Forum Moderators: open
Now I am thinking about a Google readable Forum. (only text, no links)
Besides the advantages for the visitors and the spamming problem, what are the advantages and disadvantages of a Google readable forum?
PR, visitors from Google, authority, etc.
Content, content, content is best for full text indexing search engines.
Do some thread title searches in Google for some of the older (that is indexed) threads and see how WebmasterWorld comes up nicely.
afaik Google will ignore any pages with three or more parameters.
Jever
There have been two main advantages to the visibility of the website:
1) The site appears larger and more pages connecting to the homepage, therefore giving increasing pagerank.
2) More potential keywords that are beign created by your users, thereby increasing the chances of users coming to your site.
The disadvantages relate mostly to the effort required to do it right - WebmasterWorld works because of the great effort put in by Brett, the admins, and mods. Spammers have to be identified and stopped, posters need to be cautioned, posts need to be edited and moved, orphan posts need replies, etc. Once your forum takes off, it really needs constant attention.
The other issue is the financial return. If your forum takes off, you may find it consuming the majority of your bandwidth usage, site management time, etc. It's fairly hard to make money on a forum, though. Very few can charge a serious fee. Banner ads and the like tend to not perform very well, either. (I think forum readers tune 'em out as they click from thread to thread.) Assuming the site has a profit objective, you'll have to decide whether the costs of the forum are offset by the increase in business on the rest of the site.
Overall, I think it can be worth the effort - you just don't want to go into it blind.
1) The site appears larger and more pages connecting to the homepage, therefore giving increasing pagerank
IMO, if you add pages to your site more and more, you dilute the initial feedback of Pagerank to your (index) page. However, once the new pages get their own external inbound links, the Pagerank feedback can be positive.
IMO, if you add pages to your site more and more, you dilute the initial feedback of Pagerank to your (index) page. However, once the new pages get their own external inbound links, the Pagerank feedback can be positive.
What I had in mind was a web structure that from the homepage there is a fixed number of links to the internal sections of the site. However every page of the site, even if not accessible from the homepage directly, has a link to the homepage.
Similarly for the pages in the forum: they can not be reached directly from the homepage but are two clicks away, however they all link to the homepage. In this case there is a growing number of internal pages linking to the homepage.
Whilst links from within the site do not count much towards page-rank, they do contribute something. Therefore an advantage of having a forum is that of having a gently (ok, a very, very gently) increasing page-rank.
This is in addition to advantages mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
If a PR boost is the primary objective, it would be far more productive, IMO, to spend the time looking for a few good links.
I've been able to track several sales that originated at Google traffic to our Forum, so it has given us business.
Make sure your forum generates (or fakes) static HTML documents so Google will actually crawl all the pages.
Other than that, stay active in your forum and keep the volume of content as high as possible. More content = more traffic.
