Is WebMasterWorld forum optimized? How do I optimize a FORUM / BBS?

I want to make a forum (like this) that is SE optimized...HOW?

[GrendelKhan TSU]

How would one go about building a forum/bbs site (much like Webmasterworld) that is optimized? (Obviously, users will create the content, but assuming they produce rich releveant content)

Are there ways to make sure the architecture and text is picked up/crawled?

I heard from the San Jose SEM conference that session IDs and the really long urls that a forum I have used produces is bad bad bad for SEO (esp. with google). (Can I say which forum program I used? I am not associated with them.)

So how do I make sure or check that a forum program will produce posts (like on WebmasterWorld) that are optimized? Are there pre-packaged forum programs that produce more optimized content than others?

How do I evaluate/look at programs or bbs/forums I find (for reference and learning) to tell if they are optimized?

I am ready to go with the site (idea, resources etc.), ...I just want crawlable content and to know if there are design concerns I should think about for a community before officially setting up (beyond the "normal" web site SEO concerns).

asp? php? cgi? does it matter?

( btw, this is in another language...so no worries for competition or anything. :P )

[dmorison]

Best way is simply to put yourself in the mindset of a crawler. Ask yourself how a crawler would view the site. Can every thread be reached easily? What about multiple page threads with hundreds of posts? Are the URLs crawler friendly (as you say, not full of session ID's and other rubbish)? Once in a thread; is the page displaying the thread well optimised (thread title as the page <title> etc.)? Is there an "archive" or some other mechanism for a crawler to reach the entire site at any point in the future? Do posts have static URLs - so when somebody finds a thread via search in the future the page will still be there (even if they can't make a new post)?

An optimised forum is really no different to any other well optimised site - same rules apply; just think like a spider!

The net's biggest forums that are SE friendly seem to be custom jobs (WebmasterWorld, a certain very large Pilots forum etc.). The developers of plug and play forum packages (phpBB etc.) do seem to be catching on, but are not really there yet.

Search WebmasterWorld for "forum optimization" (or something like that) and you'll find people talking about using mod_rewrite to make some forum software more SE friendly.

asp? php? cgi? does it matter?

Server side technology is just that - server side. It has no bearing on how the outside world views your site - all you return is HTML!

[Gus_R]

I run a forum like site, a big problem is deep crawl:
It's better to split threads into several pages to get more pages,links,anchor,etc but as deep as pages reach less visits from bots and less pagerank.
WW has a link structure avoids deep linking "pages(1)(2)(3)"

Index intervals must be considered too (in my case post expires)

btw, asp with dynamic url works perfect.

[georgeek]

Take a good look at ASPPlayground where you can insert the message subject into the URL and set the meta tags. Very search engine friendly.

[GrendelKhan TSU]

Thank you everyone for your feedback...going to take a little bit to process and research based on your responses. I'll let you know as I progress as I know I will have lots more questions. :D

(btw, I did several searches on this site without much luck. too bad the internal site search doesn't work as well as the spiders themselves. lol)