Adding Forum To A Website - and avoiding penalties

[herculano]

Hi Folks,

I wanted to find out what your opinions are before I deploy a new forum into our site.

Site profile is
1. PR5
2. got about 1900 to 2000 pages and growing.
3. 60k inbound links all are one way links - none are paid.
4. quite a bit of people emailing us for questions and support
5. domain about six months old.

What are the common pitfalls we need to avoid so that we don't get penalized by google.. after getting sandboxed/penalized in the past I'm somewhat afraid of doing too many changes on our sites.

FYI.. this is not related to our other site with pr5 that disappeared from google in another thread that I opened in this forum.

[tedster]

The most common pitfall is not locking down your forum software so that it only creates one url per page. Google has definitely improved in handling canonical issues on their own, but it's still a best practice not to create them in the first place.

[walkman]

herculano,
60K links in 6 months? Wow. You must have have some content. Is this the site that was demoted by Google? [webmasterworld.com...]

I echo what tedster said, and major scripts are aware of this too, and also have their own robots.txt to avoid duplicates. Other than that forums should help you with new content, more visitors, potential links and all the good stuff.

[herculano]

hi walkman, no it's a different site...

tedster, walkman - thanks, I'll will take note of the pitfall you mentioned.