Category pages in forums

[RyanKent]

I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages.

An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums.

If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to.

I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information.

Please share any thoughts or best practices.

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Ryan, I think you answered your own question. A wiki type page with links to forums could be pretty useful I feel. Good idea! Compare that to your standard forum category page such as Google's Webmaster Forum. I would not 'noindex' the page either, because you're likely to get a lot of useful links to that page, and could rank for some good queries with it.

Would it be possible to expand on your wiki idea, and possible have social type content on the page as well? perhaps for example, you could pull in a couple tweets about each, or something of that nature. Mostly, I'm thinking, how could the page be made more shareable.

What do you think?