Could adding a forum hurt?

[Fuzzyfish1000]

As in the title - I have a site which does quite nicely, and has a decent eCPM and CTR. I've been thinking about adding a forum to the site - purely because I think it would be a nice feature, nothing to do with adsense.

But... and there is a but - is it possible that the increased traffic without the clicks could hurt the site over-all? Is that something that's likely to trigger smart-pricing? Because my traffic would go up quite dramatically, but the clicks would increase all that much...

Any thoughts appreciated, as always. Has anyone else tried this on an established site?

[martinibuster]

The EPC remains the same. Some channels have high EPC because of their topic, and others are lower corresponding to their own market forces.

While my forums have lower EPC than some of the other channels, they're also higher than others.

Adding a forum to an existing site is a good way to generate fresh content and has had no negative effects, in my personal experience.

[cmendla]

One thing You need to keep in mind is that when you run a forum you need to make sure that the forum software constantly has the latest patches . They are so vulnerable to certain types of attacks

The other problem I had was that I had phpbb on a couple of my sites. For some reason the Googlebot got confused with the sessions . The net result was that for two of my sites my entire monthly bandwidth allocation got used up in two days . I ended up deleting the forums entirely and the sites are finally starting to recover about a year later.

Another issue that I ran into was blatant spam. I didn't moderate one of the boards for couple weeks and found that my site , which was a locality site, was jammed with hundreds of porn and gambling links courtesy of a couple of visitors. Again that was my fault for not moderating the site closely enough. With any luck you can get people to volunteer to moderate sections of your forums

However as MartiniBuster stated, forums are great way of creating fresh content . When I get a chance I'm probably going to reinstall the forums on a least one or two sites.

[Fuzzyfish1000]

Thanks for that. I did wonder if it would be ok if I put it on it's seperate channel... It's my own code, so I'm rigerously checking for security flaws, etc. I had a phpbb forum hacked a year or so back, and it wasn't fun. I guess Google must think they're ok, as they have a forum-adsense advice page.

I think I'll add it in!

[leolapinos]

just go for it. It does well for me.