Does Google handle forums differently than other sites?

[specter]

Hello,

Does promoting a discussion forum on Google require a different strategy comparison to a traditional html website?

I would mean:does Google crawl the whole forum simply giving it the first level domain or should I submit it the single threads/posts urls?

Thanks. :)

[Robert Charlton]

I would mean:does Google crawl the whole forum simply giving it the first level domain or should I submit it the single threads/posts urls?

specter - Submitting to Google is unnecessary and not generally useful. Google finds pages on its own via links from other pages in its index.

Inbound links to a page are necessary not only for Google to find a page, but also for that page to rank. These can be internal navigation links on your site, or external inbound links (ie, links from other sites).

On competitive searches, it's often important to have external inbounds... ie, link "votes" from others... for a page to rank.

If a discussion is particularly good, you might try to publicize it via newsletters, front page higlighting, or try to get buzz on other forums and blogs. But simply submitting to Google without the links is, IMO, a waste of time.

[kidder]

I am interested to hear if Google has a different set of rules for forums in general.

[netchicken1]

I submit a sitemap to google evey few weeks. I find google treats old threads with as much importance as new ones, that means that every thread is a google entry..

I have hacked (SEO'ed) my board to make it google friendly and feel its treated as well vanilla html pages.

Forums have a lot of repetitive content in the thread, usernames, off topic text etc, I have stripped that all out.

Also added h1 and h2 tags to the threads, and cut out as much duplicate entries (reply, quote, print etc) to the bots. My robots txt limits the bots and guest access is very limited to prevent the bots indexing dup content.

[specter]

specter - Submitting to Google is unnecessary and not generally useful. Google finds pages on its own via links from other pages in its index.

Inbound links to a page are necessary not only for Google to find a page, but also for that page to rank. These can be internal navigation links on your site, or external inbound links (ie, links from other sites).

On competitive searches, it's often important to have external inbounds... ie, link "votes" from others... for a page to rank.

If a discussion is particularly good, you might try to publicize it via newsletters, front page higlighting, or try to get buzz on other forums and blogs. But simply submitting to Google without the links is, IMO, a waste of time.

I'm aware of that Robert. What really I'd like to know is if once that google finds the front page, it follows automatically the thread links (like with a sitemap page on a normal site)or if this requires an addictional (external)linking...