Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It does on Google.. I tried it twice and sure enough soon as I add the forum I drop far far fra back in ranking on home page and as soon as I drop the forum ranking pops bak eot normal.. this happens with 24 hours both ways
Not sure what to do..cant really afford to lose the traffic wait months to maybe gain it back
anyone else notice this?
Using SMF forum
Most Google bans involve linking issues, and a badly-managed forum is a disaster waiting to happen.
The forum should utilise 'nofollow' for profiles and signatures; links in posts should also use nofollow, and the forum needs to be moderated to avoid link abuse.
It's good SEO adbvice to people to join forums, and be an active member, and use signatures to promote a site. Unfortunatelt, many so-called SEOs still advise joining to link drop. And those spammy links, while not helping the dropper, can ruin your site.
verified twice
Well that simply does not make sense - unless it's a new site, and any major change could precipitate 'sandbox'-type behaviours ...
Long long gone are the days where you could make some changes and see the results within 24 hours.
TJ
I had a forum for years (hosted on a third party forum network) and had no trouble until they raised their prices and I added an Invision Board to the site.
Shortly after that, rankings and traffic for that site tanked. It still isn't back where it was, even after adding lots of disallows to robots.txt, but it seems to be getting better.
I drop far far fra back in ranking on home page and as soon as I drop the forum ranking pops bak eot normal...
How does your home page change by adding the forum? By adding the forum, are you adding links(to the forum), content (last 5 posts, etc), news ("Check out our new keyword forums!), etc.?
One of my sites that has nothing to do with photo galleries, has a photo gallery on it. I have it there because I (and my family and friends) like it, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the overall theme of the site. I also displayed 5 random pictures (that link to the actual pictures in the gallery) from the gallery on the home page.
A week ago, I removed the 5 random pictures and my home page moved up 3 positions for the main keyword phrase I'm targeting for the home page itself. I assume because I have 5 less links on the home page and increased some keyword density (albeit slightly).
I know it's not a big move, but it does illustrate how adding something like a gallery or forums, can change your home page and change your serps ranking.
Just let the bots get to it and you have instant mess (posts or no posts).
First if you link to it as example.com/myplace/ you will discover that it links to itself as example.com/myplace/index.php then there are those session ids that it uses. Even if you get rid of the session id use (after discovering the issue), you still have index entries in the G index that will comeback to haunt you.
It isn't that forums are the problem it is mess creating forums that are the problem.
A forum, a forum, my kingdom for a decent canonical forum system.
Sorry couldn't resist.
