Message Boards will help in the Search Engines

A well posted to message board can bring much traffic

[EliteWeb]

Having a well rounded, constantly posted to discussion board will help you out in the search engines. I have many web pages that have a good amount of visitors. Once I setup the message board things changed I got many many more visitors, both returning and from the Search engines.

Before the discussion board the percentages were low for the engines, nice and equil for the most part, for example Google's results brought 100-200 people to our site a day, with the discussion board Google brings 400-800 a day.

Many people miss out on having a message board because they do not want people searching for something on the engines then coming to a message board. Modify the board, include your sites navigation around the message board in the templates. That way people can easily weave in and out of message board and your site. Having a message board is not anything new, just missed out by many people ;)

It is also a stickyness factor, having the sites feel built around the board brings people back constantly and often visiting your main page.

[diddlydazz]

Cheers :)

Dazz

[Key_Master]

Brett, the text of the link is indexed (you're not really hiding it from the bot) but it doesn't count for or against you as far as link pop goes. The recieving site also isn't effected (beyond the text of the link).

Thats the way it should be. I should be able to pass on a useful link to a visitor and not have to worry about SEO or it biting me in the @ss later on. Example, I've had two outbound links to sites where the domains were snatched up by PR0'd p0rn sites. One was a huge corporation (had their domain name stolen) and the other was a major health organization.

[EliteWeb]

Forums will bring more traffic and in turn cost you more bandwidth. For those who do not utilize all of their bandwidth, why not use a bit more with a message board, for the others who use a bit too much - Keep the graphics low on the site, like WebmasterWorld there is only one header image, and a few smileys (oh ya and the donation button). My board however we have a full sized banner which sits up there and wastes all my bandwidth, along with smiley faces that can roll around ;)

[sun818]

For those interested, I've been researching free Perl message board scripts that are non-DB driven and output static HTML files. Question: If the category/topic navigation area is based on query strings, will the resulting pages in static HTML get indexed?

Anyway, here's what I came up with so far:
1. CGI-Factory Message Board
Allows guest posting which I was looking for as well.

2. DCForum Lite 3.0
No longer on the official web site but archived zip files are floating around.

3. Discus (free version)
User self register is disabled

[troppo]

Just a thought as a possible addition - even a dummy like me could install - not sure how the functionality compares to what you want - but interface is clean and nice - mambo loudmouth forum (open source) seems pretty good. This thread inspired me to go and install it. I don't think I'm meant to post url's here (or is free stuff ok) but you'll find it pretty easy through hotscripts etc.

Cheers
Troppo

[Stickymaster]

On the subject of forums - is it true that a forum must be turned to HTML for the spiders to crawl it?

Does that make sense?

Cheers,

Stickymaster.

[brotherhood of LAN]

no, you dont have to turn it into HTML as such :)

If you look at the URL when you reply to messages here it has a ? in the URL. Many spiders cant swallow these question marks in the URL. Thus, if you wanted to gain quantities of traffic from most engines, youd need to get rid of the ?

There are methods to do it on the server side, one other way is simply to archive old messages with as HTML, the easiest pill for spiders to swallow.

And as you are archiving them (and of course they have been moderated/reviewed...you can make sure there aint no spammy URL's/keywords in the thread, since the .htm is gonna be sittin there gathering dust (and visitors) for a while

hope that answers the q

[Stickymaster]

Hi brotherhood of LAN, thanks for pointing that out to me. As you can see I'm pretty docile when it comes to search engine related stuff.

Cheers,

Stickymaster.