Forum Moderators: open
first of all, thanks for all this priceless info that I find here every day.
I have a question. We have a product and the support forum for it. The forum attracts many visitors who come from Google and are not familiar with the product.
The forum does not have the navigation system that applies to all other website areas. So the visitors could quickly grasp what this forum is about, I am thinking about turning on the parser that would replace the product name with a link to a product home page.
For example, if a forum thread has the product name in it, the parser will replace it with the link to the product's home page.
before:
"ProductXXX can be used blah-blah-blah"
after:
<a href="www.producthomepage.com">ProductXXX</a> can be used blah-blah-blah
As a result of these changes every forum page will have on average between 2 and 4 links that point to the home page.
It looks OK. But I am concerned how search engines will consider this.
And one more question: Will this have a positive effect on the product home page rank?
Many thanks,
Nova
[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:56 pm (utc) on April 15, 2004]
[edit reason] Generalized Question (removed Google reference) [/edit]
Having every page in your forum linking to your home page should not be any problem, especially not when all of those links are put in a natural context.
Nova
