Can low quality forum content impact a domain?

[vlexo]

Are there any cases out there whereby low quality content on the forums will have an impact on the rest of the site?

I know with Hub Pages, the CEO stated that low quality parts of the site had an impact on the rest of the site. That site is purely user generated content, so why would the same not hold true to forums, for example?

I'm however looking for specific cases with forums and if whether anyone has been impacted this way?

[martinibuster]

...so why would the same not hold true to forums, for example?

1. Because the forum owner has the ability to moderate for quality. The admin can also isolate certain post topics to forum categories that are not crawlable by spiders or blocked to all but registered members. It's not an all or nothing situation. There are steps an admin can take to assure quality. Some admins do not take those steps because there is a fear that those steps might inhibit growth. Whether that fear is justified is a matter of debate.

2. The Hub Pages statement you refer to I believe relates to a Panda issue. It could have been a member issue. But it could also have been aggressive on-page SEO. I would encourage you to keep an open mind about Hub Pages by taking into consideration that there may be more going on at Hub Pages than poor UGC. For example, a Google Trends report for Hub Pages indicates a higher level of search user popularity in India than anywhere else in the world, dwarfing the popularity in North America. That may be an indication of issues beyond UGC content that are dogging Hub Pages.

3. Reddit is a free-for-all UGC site containing areas of content that could be termed low quality. However it ranks fairly well. Reddit is built on the model of free for all UGC and possibly serves as a counter-argument or challenge to the idea that poor UGC could undermine an entire site. Reddit is highly popular in North America, in contrast to Hub Pages which is not as popular.

4. A Google Trends comparison of HubPages.com versus Reddit.com shows that HubPages.com generates a declining level of search queries, possibly indicative of its waning popularity with users. Reddit however generates a high level of user popularity that is actually growing- the opposite of HubPages.com. What the tale of the trend indicates is that there may be more going wrong with HubPages.com than simply poor user generated content because Reddit is a pure UGC site containing content that can be deemed far worse in quality yet Reddit has high level pages that rank surprisingly well.

5. On the flip side, Reddit is losing money, which reminds me of another consideration. Over the course of many years I have observed that traffic does not directly correlate to income. An important point to consider and one that is not always clear to some when they are planning a site. It's a common mistake to focus on traffic volume, as if the volume itself is a guarantee of income. Traffic does not always correlate to income.

[netmeg]

It's one thing. If it tips the balance of quality plus other factors, then probably yea, it can affect the domain. By itself, if everything else is fine? I doubt it. I really think we're past the time that *one thing* can tank an otherwise solid website or domain.

[martinibuster]

That's a good point. Many so-called signals of quality, taken alone, can lead to varying degrees of false positives. Research has discovered that incorporating multiple kinds of signals dramatically improves the accuracy rate of spam fighting algorithms.

A common error I see in the forums is for a member to dispute the accuracy of a given spam fighting approach and dismiss that signal based on the reasoning that the individual signal could lead to false positives. Those members are partially correct and entirely in error. :)

They are correct that a particular signal could lead to a false positive. But in error that the search engines would for that reason not use it, because the member is not considering that signals are used in conjunction with other signals to improve the accuracy. Signals aren't used alone, it's naïve to think so and a mistake to dismiss a signal under the assumption that it is used in isolation.

[JS_Harris]

Matt Cutts once discussed this, and so did I at length with Tedster. Matt said that low quality pages will rank poorly on their own merit but that if your domain has enough of them that they will in fact act like an anchor for the entire site. I can verify that this is still true quite simply:

- Study your data and find pages that Google does not send traffic to
- Apply the noindex meta tag to these individual pages
- When the data is refreshed in serps you will see some positive movement for the other pages

Caveat - Not receiving traffic is not a sign of low quality on its own, it can also mean that there is a better option from your site or that there is some other issue with the page that could be cleaned up. Sometimes you might be ranking #8 with one page and getting no traffic to another page but the page not getting traffic WOULD rank #3 if the #8 page didn't exist(or had fewer incoming links), these are much harder to identify.

Regardless, you can noindex them and decide it you want to clean them up or just leave them. DO NOT add these to robots.txt and DO NOT delete these unless you are sure they are complete junk. Pages that get no traffic still influence the flow of trust between your pages, still may have incoming links and noindex is the best option.

Tip: apply this approach to your social network content as well. Tweets that received no re-tweets or favorites can safely be deleted and this will bring your average engagement per tweet up a bit which *might* be enough to rank your account more highly for various hashtags or follow suggestions.

Less is more.

[mikhailblaze]

- As for user-generated content in forums, I do think Google is a bit lenient when it comes to cracking down on forums. And hey, it's not as if these kinds of sites rely on SEO to gain traffic, unlike HubPages (which has devolved into a website with spam-filled content). Though Hubs has stringent quality control measures, its users have devised means to counter moderation.

- Bear in mind that Google relies on links as a ranking factor. I do know that most Hubs have links which are inserted for - SEO purposes - which may have caused the penalty. In forums, take WBW as an example - you could barely place links here and it's heavily moderated. I'm an active member of a basketball forum, and junk and spammy content is taken down within an hour.

- Martinibuster post concerning Reddit's characteristic as a UGC is spot on. The site could care less if they're struck by a Google Penalty: they'll still have users checking the threads. Aside from which, I'd like to point out that Reddit is also heavily moderated, and they've devised algorithms which monitors posts more closely (Reddit bot).

[martinibuster]

mikhailblaze, thanks for clarifying the moderation situation at Reddit. I often lump moderating for spam together with the job of moderating for trolls. Clearly it's a free for all in terms of freedom of speech and mikhailblaze clarified that it's not a free for all in terms of spam. Thanks for your contribution to this discussion! :)

[mikhailblaze]

You're welcome martini :)

I'm an avid Redditor, and I spend at least three hours checking the site out every day (I have no life), but the mods - and the site itself - is working hard to rid the site of spam. I've even been banned from a subreddit once.