When it comes to online communities there are some disturbing trends taking place right now. Forum administrators are spending too much time working to improve their Google page rankings, and on search engine optimization in general.
The thought behind this trend is that better page rankings make a community simpler to find. Even if there is a truth to the thought that making your forum rank higher in searches will get you more sign-ups, there are some problems with this line of reasoning.
First of all Google PageRank isn’t really relevant for a forum. A high page rank may help somewhat with SEO, but it will never help to keep the community itself committed. In other words, what excellent is a high search engine ranking and a flood of new visitors if there is no activity in the community to support your member base, and nothing to attract new signups?
In this article we will take a closer look at Google’s page ranking system, and at how it fails when it comes to forums.A Look at Google Page Rank
Previous to we discuss page rankings for forums, let’s cover the PageRank system itself.
Google produced page rankings as an simple way to represent the popularity of a website. The thought behind page rank is that the more links that a website has pointing to it, the more standard the site must be.
To gauge a site’s popularity Google will count the number of one-way links to that site, analyze the popularity of the site that provides a link, and also analyze the relevancy of each link. With this data, Google’s system calculates a page rank. In other words PageRank is a single number that represents the popularity of a web site.
Even if this system works for a fixed website (assuming people aren’t cheating the system by buying relevant links), it doesn’t work well for a forum.Google Page Rank and Forums
For a bulletin board, the page rank numbers are somewhat irrelevant. They do count to a certain degree on the front page of the forum. But the threads themselves (the vital content on the site) are rarely rated properly.
In fact, by the time a single page of a forum has a excellent page rank; it is usually considered an ancient post. The thread may have held the most useful information on the web, and it may get hundreds of answers; but, since no one is between to it, the page rank is still reasonably low.
The same thought holds right for the forums in their entirety. An ancient forum, which no longer houses an committed community, will evenly have a much higher page rank than the newer committed community. The reason for this is reasonably simple. Many people have happened across ancient threads and linked to them to provide information to others. This hasn’t happened with the newer site yet.
What it takes to rank a forum, is a look at aspects that topic to community.Let Page Rank Take Care of Itself, and Focus on the Community
If you wanted a gauge to the shape of an online community you would have to account for many factors. Member count, the activity of those members, thread count, posting activity, and more would be have to be taken into account to gain a picture of where the forum really ranks when compared to a further (the factors that BoardsMD – http://www.boardsmd.com – looks at).
Over time, as more people start to link to the information on the forum, the page rank will grow involuntarily. A forum administrator shouldn’t waste their time working on improving page rankings. The focus should permanently be on the community itself, and on the members. With a healthy committed community, page ranks will take care of themselves, and your site will be more valuable to members since your focus is permanently on forum shape.
Posts Tagged ‘Rank’
Google Page Rank Falls Short For Forums
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010On-Site Redirects: Building Page Rank And The Bottom Line
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Evenly pages or sections of your site have urban some link like that would better serve other pages you were prefer to having ranking or would rather have users spending time with. So what you need to do is get those bank links and PageRank where you need it.
Redirects and Search Engines
Redirects involuntarily send a visitor to a specific page once the visitor accesses the site. The redirect can be to a further page on the site or to a completely different site altogether. Redirects come in a few flavors the most vital for this discussion are 301 redirects which are viewed as stable and 302 redirects, seen by spiders as temporary.
Redirects, regardless of type, have been identified by SEO professionals as PR killers. Matt Cutts, a Google Software Engineer, stated in a Search Engine Strategies conference that “…clear disclosure to machines won’t pass Page Rank [with] a 302 redirect.” Even today there are hackers and crackers using redirects to hi-jack websites, even though spiders are capable of detecting nefarious activity. The behavior of 301 redirects but is reasonably the opposite.
But, on-site redirects are commonly employed by site owners to increase site visibility on SERPs and to take the visitor to the “excellent material.” Here’s how this practice is employed:
On-Site Redirects: the Basics
It’s vital to recognize that the structure of your website is pivotal to long term success in search engine result pages.
The site owner or SEO optimizes a deep site page to the max. The only point of this page is to rank highly on SERPs and in some cases, the text on the SERPs link is unusable by humans because it’s designed for SEO only. Botspeak. But, once the visitor clicks the SERPs link to the highly-optimized page, he’s involuntarily redirected to a page or a site designed for human use, i.e. optimized for conversion.
Note: Search engine algorithms can easily notice redirects and, frankly, they are still viewed with suspicion by spiders. In fact, a site page may be penalized. The entire site may be whacked if the redirect is deemed suspect.
Spiders are not opposed to redirects per se. In fact, if the redirect is considered valid – as in the case of a blog that delivers a “confirmation of receipt” page previous to redirecting the visitor to the blog post itself. This is viewed as an acceptable practice because it provides benefit to the search engine user.
Using Redirects Wisely
A link is a redirect – taking visitors to other pages of a site. Embed text links on high ranking pages deep in the site. Optimize these pages for SEO and use redirects to take visitors to the appropriate zone or page of the site. Example: A site selling insurance harvest employs the following on a page deep in the site:
“Unfortunately, you never know what the future holds, but you can protect your loved ones now and in the future.”
The link is embedded in informational content, which ranks higher, deep within the site. By placing the text link within this informational context, the visitor is provided an immediate option to the now-recognized risk – the lack of term life coverage.
Internal between is a critical significance in site design and content architecture. Making highly optimized pages designed to appeal to SEO bots deep within a site (the site archives, e.g.), with links to pages higher up in page heirarchy is a legit use of what in effect is a redirect, though bots won’t see these links as such.
Robot.txt and NoFollow
The redirect will be on the spot (nearly) to visitors, count maybe a second to download times. But, bots will righteously crawl these sites when the opportunity arises – and that includes anytime a visitor with a Google toolbar installed visits your site. Googlebots are aggressive small letter-string junkies. A visitor can initiate a crawl so you want to be prepared for on-site bot activity.
Clearly identify those pages that are not to be indexed. This can be by individual page with nofollow or noindex tags, or if there are a number of pages designated off limits to spiders, make a robot.txt file.
A robert.txt file is urban identifying all pages off limits to spiders and placed in the site’s root directory. Remember to update the site’s robot.txt file as more pages are added to the site.
On-Page Optimization
The objective of redirects is on-page optimization – both SEO and conversion ratio optimization. At this stage in the buy sequence, the prospect has demonstrated enough interest to click on a deep link to learn more about harvest and air force. Once that link is clicked by a human or tracked by a spider, both bots and eyeballs must be pleased with what they see.
A key point for non-tech site owners: bots wouldn’t know an attractive site if it bit its digital butt. Bots never see the presentation layer, which could be a mess. Bots read the black and white HTML and XML data that forms the site’s structure. On-page optimization will appear in the page’s code.
On-page optimization involves the use of links – which information links to what zone or page? Each page is optimized to drive the visitor deeper into the site and to, ultimately, exchange.
Residency of “trip-wire” links is an elemental aspect of page design. Trip wire links are embedded in content that evokes an emotional response in the reader, a response that demands immediate action. The example of the embedded insurance link above is a excellent example of trip wire links that optimize each page for conversion and for more expansive and complete indexing of the site by bots.
Remember, bots follow links. Embed links deep in your site on highly ranked pages. These links involuntarily redirect the visitor to less optimized but more human-friendly pages or sites.
Embed text links deep in site text with text embedded, intra-site links placed for maximum emotional response, i.e. a link to a sign up page embedded in an informational article about the benefits of jogging. Spiders and humans will follow well-placed, contextual links embedded in the body text.
This insures that spiders stay onsite longer, indexing more pages and more accurately placing indexed pages within the right folder of the search engine’s classification system (the taxonomy employed by Google, Yahoo, etc. determines how and where a site is classified).
Further, redirects can increase both page rank and site revenues when on-page optimization and nofollow and robot.txt files are used to direct the activities of bots. Remember, a Googlebot will try to crawl any site visited by a user with a Google toolbar installed so, virtually any visitor is a potential opportunity for Googlebot to spider a site.
Use redirects to appeal to both spiders and humans and redirect a site’s page rank in the process.