Index forum sites

[fabiank]

Hi Moz Team,

somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer

Here is one more question:

I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential.

The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10.

a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow?

b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk

c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once.

d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1.

Looking forward to hear from you soon!

Best

Fabian

[alfredopalconit]

a) imho its best to keep the urls as is for old pages and all new pages will have the clean urls

b) theres an update that subdomains are now treated the same with folders

c)  for me its ok to release it all at once. just dont promote it yet. let search engines find in naturally.

d)  i dont understand this one hehehehe

[fabiank]

Thanks Alfredo for your answer.

a) i am not sure that is possible as i think the vSEO Plugin changes all URLs, but ill check that.

b) Are you sure? Do you have any resource or article about that?

d) What i mean is: 1 Thread/Topic has lets say 500 Posts, which are evenly distributed over 50 Pages. Shall i index them all or only the first page of the Thread?

[rishil]

To start with if the forum ISNT indexed, get the URLS changed, and try and get all the titles customosed so they arent generic across every thread.

I suggest a subdomain for forums, as you point out, it is seen as a separate site. you can always flow strenght from the forum into the main TLD by cross linking, which I think is much better to do, however some may disagree with this.

If I were in your position, I would prefer to release section by section - a massive blast of content would be more of a flag then a slow release - this is my personal opinion.

Re threads - I would follow/noindex all threads tht arent on the first page of the post -  that way, the juice follows and gets crawled. Adding relcanon to those may also help preserve the strength...

[AaronWheeler]

Hey Fabian,

I'm really sorry that your previous question was lost - I'm not sure what happened there! I don't see your previous question, but I did refund that question credit for you so you should now have that back, at least. Please feel free to report the question and we'll try to get you an answer as quickly as possible. If you're still having problems, please feel free to email help@seomoz.org and we'll try to look into it further. Thanks!

Cheers,

Aaron