Are dedicated forums becoming more popular in search engine rankings?

[JS_Harris]

I've recently noticed that a forum has jumped to top spot for several extremely competitive topics. Prior to the jump the forums were in the top 20 for their subjects but to see them in top spot is a bit of a surprise.

It's a surprise because there is no content outside of the forums, the forums on these sites are the content. All six of the ones I've noticed getting into the coveted top spot passed right by the manufacturers official sites, past wikipedia, past magazines that are both online and off on the subject and past some other extremely deep pocketed competition.

None of the six I've noticed making the jump this week are well coded according to W3C. I don't see any clear cut areas on any of the forum sites that suggest them to have an edge, most don't even rank well for any similar terms. They are the leading forum on their topic and have more backlinks than any of the regular sites but that is all. It's a bit like seeing a forum about example jump ahead of example for the term example. Are forums becoming more well liked by search engines recently?

[rogerd]

>>They are the leading forum on their topic and have more backlinks than any of the regular sites but that is all.

I think that's the answer to your question. In addition, they may well have more content than other sites. The combination of better linkage and more content is probably the explanation.

[JS_Harris]

That explains why they rank but what explains the recent jump? They had more links before, about ten times more links on a couple of the forums actually.

[rogerd]

Hmmm, no reason occurs to me - I doubt if Google decided to boost forum rankings as such. However, a minor algo shift that favored, for example, deep content could have that effect.

In general, Google does a superior job of indexing and delivering deep content. That's why I use Google almost exclusively when researching tech problems and the like.

It wouldn't surprise me to see the other SEs gradually doing a better job with deep content (MSN in particular has been bad at this), which might produce an apparent boost in the rankings.