Relating forum discussions to improve internal linking

[rasmusbang]

Hi all,

I have a matter i would like a discussion about, since I am looking for a good solution.

First the case:

I have a site with a large community based discussion board. We daily have 40 to 80 active forum threads with average of 200 posts. As it is right now each thread page shows, at the bottom of the thread, the 20 threads with latest activity.

From a SEO point of view this is not the best solution, since all thread pages passes link juice to the latest 20 threads. However, the threads change daily so the juice is sprayed around all over the place.

What I want to do is related forum threads, such that each thread at the bottom shows up to 10 threads which could be of interest to the reader. In this way one thread will have more or less the same threads at the bottom at all time, unless the relevancy is better for other threads, causing som minor changes to happen over time.

The question is, how can one do this?

In the backend, the forum has two tables. One holding threads and one holding posts relating to the threads. All in all the system has 66.500 threads, and in total 469.000 posts. Every thread has a title, and the posts are of varying length.

The threads have categories, but they are not so distinct that a thread in one category can not be related to a thread in another category. So I would like to make the relevancy from the title of the thread and the content of the forum posts.

As of yet I have not come up with a good solution, and i will look forward to reading any feedback for this.

I will answer any questions as fast as possible, to get a good discussion goint here.

Best regards,

Rasmus

[Aeronet]

Hi Rasmus,

There is a mod for SMF (Simple Machine Forum) that allow you to tag a topic, then use those tags to produce the related posts (http://mods.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=579 ), maybe you can work it out in your forum.