Forum Moderators: open
Lately I have noticed that entries on my forum begin to take over positions on the search engines which where formerly being held by content of my website. So more and more visitors are going directly to the forum - which is a bad thing for my Adsense revenue since for whatever reason the click through rate on forums in general are only a friction of that on normal websites and my forum is no exception here.
So what should I do? Deliberately sabotage the rankings of my forum? Move the forum to a different server? Try to cash in somehow on the increase of forum visitors? But how?
It is possible that what your forum is is a SERPetitor and not a competitor, i.e. someone who uses space in the SERPs you target but doesn't necessarily steal your target users.
Or, to put it another way:
Ten people walk down the street, five vegetarians and five full-blooded meat lovers. Your meaty-grill cafe will be absolutely unaffected by the brand new leaf-and-tofu cafe opening next door. Even if the rabbit-food cafe grabs 100% of their potential customers (5), they're still not going to affect your chances of bagging the meat-lovers.
On my website visitors used to check out several of the Visa services that advertise via Adsense after reading the information I provide. In the forum they will ignore the advertisements and check out the VISA services other users recommend. Which are usually the same that advertise because there are only five or six around. But nobody clicks the ads in the forum.
This is only one example it's the same with several other topics.
forums.example.com won't compete with www.example.com, they are treated as seperate domains. Many advertisers also prefer this because its easy to seperate forum traffic from main site traffic.
If a subdomain isn't an option as a permanent solution I would shift a lot of pagerank from the forums back to your regular articles by using a "similar articles" type of feature. example : at the bottom of every forum page place 5 related links back to articles on your main site. It's not just a pagerank dump but it may actually get forum members to check out the main site more too.
How big is the forum in relation to the rest of the site in terms of:
- Total pages?
- Pageviews?
- Percent of inbound links versus rest of the site?
The forum has now 10 times the number of pages as my website.
About 30% of the pageviews go to the forum.
And of course the forum is growing much faster than the website. The forum has about 2500 active users which make about 150 entries per day. No way I can compete with that much output.
You should do a global 301 so all the pages from the existing forum URL's are 301 redirected over to their new locations at the subdomain. That should help minimize rankings drops for the forum pages.
The value in placing the forum on a subdomain is outlined in JS_Harris' post. Beyond that, it should be the case that the forum pages will no longer push the main site's pages out of the SERP's...indeed you may see pages from both co-existing in some SERP's, which is a great way to build your brand presence/awareness. Then I would link in limited ways to the forum from the main site, but place more links from the forum back to the main site.
