Article content on forum platform not recognised correctly

[nrep]

I help run a reviews website, which includes review content and a discussion forum. We use a common forum script (Xenforo) to power the site, and use their resources add on to power the article side of things. These articles are very high quality, original content with plenty of external links from news sites.

However, these review pages don't rank well at all in Google - even when we're the only place with a review of that item. Search results will show other sites mentioning/linking to our review, plus a discussion thread on our site, well above the actual article. The article content does get indexed, but I am concerned that it is detected as UGC or forum content somehow, as forum software powers our entire site. The article page has no known on page SEO/indexing problems (it is included low down in the SERPs), it seems to always rank way way lower than I'd expect.

Previously, when we had a custom article script, our article content would rank as expected (not necessarily high, but if it was the only review on the subject, it would at least appear first!).

Is it likely that Google sees that this page is powered by forum software and thinks it is lower quality content? Is there anything we can do to say "hey, this isn't UGC, it's a well written, quality article". The article pages don't include any UGC or even look remotely like a forum thread, they look like proper article pages with their own URL structure (/articles/) vs (/forum/).

[goodroi]

IMHO UGC is not a red flag for Google. I have many sites with user generated content that generate strong traffic from Google. Google's automated filters are looking for weak content and UGC is often weak content which is why many people have problems with UGC. This doesn't mean UGC is automatically bad.

Think about pages with only one 10 word comment or it has 50 responses but each response is 3 words like "I agree too". Those are not good user experiences so Google does not want to reward weak content. Sites that moderate their UGC or apply standards tend to perform better. For example you could force users to write at least 20 words before they can submit a response. You could also sort the UGC, so page 1 has the most valuable UGC and then you push all the garbage UGC to page 2 which is blocked/noindexed/ or just ignored. Amazon does a good job of prioritizing their user reviews.