Site Forum for Adsense and Traffic

[mrdomainnames]

Hi,
As a newbie, I'm struggling with trying to get site traffic and adding Adsense $$ to it.

I'm thinking about putting a Forum (PHPBB) on my site. The idea would be to boost my search engine placement
and PR ranking due to all the extra (hopefully relevant) pages a site forum can generate.

- At least this is my thinking....

Can anyone offer the pros and cons. Is it even worth doing?

Thanks!

[John Carpenter]

phpbb uses sid's (session id's). This makes it very unfriendly to bots (Googlebot and AdSense bot too). The first thing you'll have to do is get rid of sid's (modify phpbb) or use other forum software that doesn't use them.

A big problem with forums as regards ads is the fact that people don't click on them as much as they do on non-forum pages. (We used to display ads on our forum pages, but the earnings were too low, so we removed them after a few weeks.)

[mrdomainnames]

Hi John,
Thanks for the info. Maybe I will look for a Forum script that does not use session IDs.

BTW, when you did have the forum up and running, did you notice an increase in search engine traffic?
My thinking is that all the extra pages could result in more/better SEO for the site - leading to more Adsense clicks...

[John Carpenter]

when you did have the forum up and running, did you notice an increase in search engine traffic?

I should clarify that it was the ads that we removed (not the forum). As for your question, we've had the forum since we launched our site, so I can't answer (we've never had a site without a forum).