Google and phpBB

forums and google

[shashlik]

Our website runs a foum, phpBB; I do see other websites with this forum that have page rank (our website itself is listed quite well and is visited by Googlebot regularly).

How long will it approx take to get page rank if unchanged, as I really would not like to mod the forum or do mod_rewrites. Time is actually not that big an issue.

[tedster]

Hello shashlik, and welcome to the forums.

PageRank is determined by linking patterns -- links, links and only links, NO content issues. The factors included in calculating the Page Rank of any specific page are:

1. Links coming from other pages
2. The Page Rank of those other pages
3. How many total links are on the other pages.

You can think of it like a vote for this page by another page. A link is a kind of weighted vote of one page for another page, and its weight is determined by dividing the PR of the other page by the total number of links it holds. (There is also another mathematical constant involved called the "damping" factor that keeps total PR from running away, but that factor is the same for every page.)

So it is not a matter of "how long" -- and although your forum's pages can vote for each other, they have no PR to vote with if you don't have some links coming in from off-site.

Also, the visible PR on the toolbar is only ujpdate a few times a year. But the real PR that Google uses behind the scenes is pdated continually, but out of our sight.

[shashlik]

thank you for the quick reply.

however, I read in other places, that specifically forums (eg pages with the names viewtopic.php, viewforum.php, etc or other page patterns seeming to come from a forum) are penalized by Google, as it is very easy to create 1000's of pages of content with a forum.

This content would be very relevant to the theme of the website, but obviously cover a large variety of keywords. The assumption I read is that Google would not want to have their index swamped with pages like this and indeed you do not see very many forums ranking high even in rather absurd combinations of keywords.

Would that be true?

[tedster]

Page Rank and "ranking" are two different questions. However, WebmasterWorld is a forum, and we definitely rank well for a huge variety of searches.

One issue with getting forum pages to rank well on various queries is that search engine limitations are, knowingly or unknowingly, built into the standard forum configuration by the original application builders. See this current thread for more:

Huge decrease in number of forum pages indexed [webmasterworld.com]