I've got a website which uses some popular off-the-shelf forum software to power the entire site. Rather than use Wordpress for articles and separate forum software, I used a "resource" plugin designed by the forum software developers to manage our articles.
This is great in its simplicity, as we only need a single bit of software to power both articles and forums. However, I've noticed that anything using the article addon ranks very poorly - so badly it's a little odd. Our articles are often linked to from other sites (with a quote), but if I paste in a quote in to Google, the original article ranks below other sites linking to the article and threads from our own site that quote it. In fact, Google prefers the linked discussion thread over the actual high-quality article every single time.
It's so odd, as the markup is correct, the are no duplicates, the linked discussion thread isn't considered a canonical (via WMT). The article doesn't look like a forum thread, it's an article system design with correct markup for editorial content.
I'm at a complete loss as to why high quality articles under-perform when using this software. We didn't have this problem before we migrated to using forum software to manage articles (years ago). Other sites that we use wordpress on don't suffer the same fate.
Is it possible that Google detects that the article page is powered by forum software and treats it as low-quality UGC, rather than a professional article written by a qualified editor? It's just a case of articles performing poorly in terms of ranking, it's more that they significantly under-perform in relation to lower quality ancillary pages that quote a sentence or two from the article (on our site and others).
