Advanced: SEO best practice for a large forum to minimise risk...?

[iProspect_Manchester]

Hi

Hope someone can offer some insight here. We have a site with an active forum. The transactional side of the site is about 300 pages totals, and the forum is well over 100,000 (and growing daily) meaning the 'important' pages account for less that 0.5% of all pages on the site.

Rankings are pretty good and we're ticking lots of boxes with the main site, with good natural links, logical architecture, appropriate keyword targeting.

I'm worried about the following:

• crawl budget
• PR flow
• Panda

We actively moderate the forum for spam and generally the content is good (for a forum anyway), so I'm just looking for any best practice tips for minimising risk. I've contemplated moving the forum to a subdomain so there's that separation, or even noindexing the forum completely, although it does pull in traffic.

Has anyone been in a similar situation?

Thanks!

[randfish]

Hi Seomvi - yes, definitely a challenging problem, especially since you're thinking preventative rather than reactive (which is very wise!).

My advice would be to consider creating some form of threshold for forum content before you expose it to Google. For example, you could have a litmus test that says, if a forum thread has <500 words or fewer than 2 unique replies, apply a META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" to the page header. In that fashion, you keep algorithms like Panda from perceiving your forum as having lots of thin content/low value pages.

For PR flow and crawl budget, I'd generally worry less. Google's gotten very adept at identifying forums, crawling them effectively, and understanding how to handle that type of content/link structure. That said, you might try using rel=prev/next to help with Google's crawling.

Wish you all the best!