Blogs vs forums - are forum's history?

[Oman]

I've spent 7 years and 13,000 post to build a forum in the niche market of foot and ankle care. The forum is a wonderful resource for patients who who have either sustained injuries or who are contemplating surgery.

Problem is, many of my pages are in the sandbox. Sure, many of them are indexed (according to Google) but try searching for them and they'll invariably have poor returns on SERP.

Ah, but put a simple post on the same topic on a Wordpress blog and you'll have virtually instant recognition on the first page of SERP's.

Any suggestions on how to bolster the search results for forums? One thing I've tried that may be suggestive of a gateway page is to write about a condition in our blog and hyperlink to it in our forum. So if I get a good post in the forum, I link to it from the blog. But that just seems like it's defeating the intent of organic search.

Any suggestions on how to optimize forums to stay out of the sandbox?

Jeff

[GooglePlex]

Wordpress blogs, and all major blogging platforms, automatically "ping" to the search engines, so they are indexed almost automatically.
A lot of the problems occur with the URL structure of forums, so its sometimes difficult for the inner posts of forums to get indexed quickly, or at all.
Unfortunately I don't know a way to bolster the forum in serps, you're idea of using a blog with links to the forum is not a bad one, and I wouldn't look at that as "defeating the purpose of organic search", in fact you are trying to promote search by getting your paged indexed and searched, not manipulating the search process.
I would recommend using a forum platform that has SEO friendly URLs, this change over might be ridiculous considering there is 7 years of content up there.
I dont have much here, I am eagerly awaiting anyone elses solutions...
Good luck

[Oman]

Howdy,

When my memory serves me well, I'll jump into Blog and ping | Pingoat and Ping-o-Matic! after a session in the forum and ping my changes. Again, that seems to go against my core belief in organic search. I hate to push information at people.

We're also using an RSS feed for each of the forum topics to try to give a bit more depth to the forum.

We're powered by UBB threads. I'll jump into their support forums and see if folks there have any ideas.

I think the unfortunate thing about forums is that the big search engines have a perception that forums are just a lot of chatter. But in so many cases they have a vast wealth of information. The challenge is just finding the way to articulate that to the search engines.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[GooglePlex]

Howdy,

When my memory serves me well, I'll jump into Blog and ping | Pingoat and Ping-o-Matic! after a session in the forum and ping my changes. Again, that seems to go against my core belief in organic search. I hate to push information at people.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

That's the wrong thinking, search isn't about you pushing info onto people, it's in fact the user pulling for info that he/she needs... You are merely making this info available more quickly via the ping tools..

Think about this: What good is organic search if your content isn't able to get searched?...

It's like saying a Denist is pushing his Dentistry service onto people by placing a sign on his door that says "Dentist".

[incrediblehelp]

Forums are not even close to dead. The serve a certain purpose. I really don't see any other type of website out there that still gets the kind of long-tail traffic that forums do. The threads are all user generated and thus fill void in the SERPs like no other site can.

[weslinda]

I would actually recommend building a FAQ type system, or Ask The Expert type system that can tie into the forums. We've worked an Ask The Expert section of one of our sites, and it accounts for a huge amount of our traffic, just make sure it's done right.

Optimal would be to cross link the two, so that you guide visitors from one to the other.

[imvain2]

I do see some issues with your forum.

The website is built in frames.

When I try to visit one of the forum topics outside of the frameset (like a search engine does), I get redirected via javascript to the topic displayed back in the frameset.

I'm not saying that this is the root of all of your problems. But I do believe it is causing some issues.

[Vaijero_Maya]

Hey Oman, I visited your site and there are a few things I can suggest you to improve things.

First thing I noticed is your forum uses frames... the URL doesn't change no matter what topics or what kind of navigation I do on your forum. You should change this. Yes, Search engines... but what about people? If I like one topic or I find it useful, I CAN'T recommend it, I can't copy the URL and use it in any way.

Second thing: This involves some research, depending on your skills, but you might identify the urls-sections of your forum to do some url rewrite... this is more friendly for your visitors to identify and to select before clicking on it. This has direct impact on search engines.

Other than this... migrating to a new forum system. This is heavy and certainly your regular users might dislike it.

Or, if your forum system allows you, tweak it... a skilled programmer could do some magic there.

[furnitureboy]

Hi I am also very interested to get an idea what gives the best SEO results blogs of furums?

[inertia]

Good comments above...

Also, have you tried any sort of PR sculpting? You've got 8,730 pages indexed? How many do you reckon there are all together? But you've only got 1,040 in the main index. You might get results for quite specific searches but for more generic searches, maybe not?