In my recent article, I provided info on how to remove showpost pages from your forum to dramatically increase crawling efficiency.

However, before you do so, you should first find out if you are getting any search traffic to your showpost pages and (if so) how much.

We can do this with Google Analytics. If you do not use Google Analytics, then you may be able to find an equivalent method in your stats software.

• Login to Google Analytics.
• Select your forum's

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Are you making the best use of Googlebot's time? If not, you are negatively impacting your SEO. One way to ensure that the time Googlebot spends on your forum is not wasted, is to get rid of inefficient, non-unique content. My focus here is on showpost pages.

While they are not "exact" copies of any other page on your site, all of the post content is already displayed on your thread pages. So they are partial duplicates.

If you want to find out how to remove them,...

FACTS:

• PageRank Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS): You see many people asking how to increase their Google PageRank, with an expressed urgency that shows they firmly believe it to still be the ultimate SEO factor.
• Insider Wrathyopia (i.e. Anger + Near Sightedness): You see a lot of SEO insiders dismiss it as worthless, and then tell you to just build links.

Well - as it turns out, Google's Visible Toolbar PageRank is *NOT* as important as you might think. It's also *NOT* completely useless!...

Most likely, YOU, like many of us at one time or another, are guilty of this:

You build a forum about cars, and you want to rank #1 for the term "cars", right? Or a forum about computers, and you want to be #1 for "PC", sound familiar?

There was a time (over 10 years ago now) when you would have a better shot at competing for top terms on the Internet. Search engines were much easier to manipulate, and the content explosion was just beginning.
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Your search long tail can be measured very easily. The main metric you should be considered with is how many different keywords do you get traffic for?

You can determine this with your Google Analytics account or other stats program. You should also be tracking your process using your Google Webmaster Tools account. Here is how vBSEO customers can make efficient use of their Google Webmaster Tools account.

When this number is growing, you are effectively growing your search...