Are forum pages generally PR0 now?

Seems like it... :)

[yosmc]

I've done some research and it appears like all forum pages (that is, threads and topics) picked up by Google are PR0. Is it something Google generally does these days, or is it related to the special structure forum pages have that they must appear to the Googlebot like one weird maze-o-links? (If not, can anybody present a major forum where the forum pages have noteworthy pagerank?)

I would also be interested if someone can share experience as to how many forum pages get spidered by Google. Seems to me like the Googlebot has become a little shy - large forums that used to have uncounted (many thousand) pages in the index have now shrunk to like 500-1000. Any observations? Thanks!

[Hardwood Guy]

Google only gets my first page of the lower priced but adequate forum set-up I have. It shows a PR0 but comes in as a backlink, so I'm assuming it's at a PR4 or higher.

[claus]

>> can anybody present a major forum where the forum pages have noteworthy pagerank?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[georgeek]

(If not, can anybody present a major forum where the forum pages have noteworthy pagerank?)

Not sure what you consider noteworthy but here are the top 20 forums based on post count.

1 Vault Network boards
2 FaceTheJury
3 IGN boards
4 Gaia Online
5 Theforce.net
6 Hardware.fr
7 Gamespy
8 Gathering of Tweakers
9 VW vortex forums
10 AnandTech
11 Broadband reports
12 Fok.nl
13 Corvette Forum
14 Honda tech
15 General [M]ayhem
16 Literotica
17 JJB
18 Transact.no
19 Chiquititas
20 Ars Technica

[rogerd]

It may not specifically be forum pages. On many sites, I'm seeing dynamic pages (with query strings) that show PR0 but perform well in searches. Clearly, these pages aren't completely devoid of PR. To me, it looks like a toolbar malfunction.

[creative craig]

It must be a big problem then rogerd, because I can think of two busy forums that act in the same way as you have dexribed.

Craig

[Bobby_Davro]

PR is largely meaningless in terms of ranking, and the PR0 doesn't mean that it is PR0: it may just be a PageRank less than 1. These are truncated/rounded numbers shown in the Toolbar.

And don't forget the toolbar lies to you. What you see is NOT what you get.

[encyclo]

It's usually all to do with session IDs - major forum software such as phpBB add them in their default configuration, making the boards difficult to spider. Google, like many SEs, tries to avoid URLs with session IDs as the URL is dependent on that particular session.

Of course, well written forum software will avoid this problem and use search-engine-friendly URLs (such as for this forum). You can also try to adapt phpBB to do the same with a combination of mod_rewrite and some hacking about with the script.

[jonknee]

A lot of forum posts don't even deserve PR 0 :).

[yosmc]

Georgeek, I skimmed through some of the forums you have listed and basically they DO have the white pagebar beyond the start page.

Claus, that's interesting. Unfortunately, since WebmasterWorld doesn't allow Google to take a cache snapshot, we'll never know what Brett feeds the Googlebot (unless he's already said it somewhere).

Rogerd, that's even more interesting. Any idea how long this has been going? (Now that you mention it, I've seen dynamic pages that used to have PR5 and are now PR0. Do they still rank well with Google? Sure!)

Bobby, imho even a Pagerank of 0.49 wouldn't make sense when the forum main page has PR5.

Encyclo, if the problem was about session ids then the pages couldn't be found via Google search at all. However, as has been mentioned, those pages are spidered normally and do quite well in the rankings (without session ids apparently).