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Forum best practice
Forum best practice
Hi there! Keen to get everyone’s take on SEO best practice for large forums (on websites that aren’t just forums). I’m aware that Google state they can tell the difference between user generated content and other page content, but the following are grey areas for me. Would love to get some thoughts and advice!
1. Duplicate content
Let’s say our domain is an e-commerce site for hotels, with listings pages for hotels across different cities and a blog that we use for evergreen content.
Could user generated posts in forums pose content cannibalisation risks if fully crawlable and indexable?
For example – if a user posts in the forum about ‘Best Hotels in Naples’ and our Naples listings page targets that keyword, could this send mixed signals to Google? Similarly, if a user posts in the forum about ‘how to find cheap hotels abroad’ and we have a blog article targeting that keyword – would the two compete? (In both cases I’m assuming the forum content isn’t thin and is relatively keyword rich and engaging because of the posts from other users in the same thread…).
If we could expect duplicate content / cannibalisation risks from the above – are there any recommended best practices to mitigate this?
2. Sub domain separation
I’ve seen a few examples of forums that are separated from the ‘main site’ through a sud-domain (e.g. discussions. domain).
Could this be an SEO consideration? Or, in other words, are there potential drawbacks in having a forum in a subfolder on the main site?
3. URL structure
I’m aware that ‘speaking URLs’ are best practice, for search engines and users, however I’ve noticed a few large forums that mix numbers into their forum URLs.
Similar to the above question, is this an SEO consideration? If we use pure speaking URLs (e.g. domain/forum/best-hotels-naples) is this opening is up to confusing signals if there is content on other parts of the site with the same slug (e.g. domain/hotels/naples)? This one is linked to my first question!
4. Thin content
Should we have rules in place where thin content (e.g. posts with no replies, or with less than X words) is initially set to noindex?
5. International content
If we have three locales /en, /fr, and /es, which all contain the same /forum/, are there recommended ways to manage the same content appearing across all three language sites? E.g should we use canonicals instead of noindexing, for example, an English language post appearing on the /fr/forum?
Hopefully that all makes sense, but let me know if anything needs clarifying! Thanks in advance.
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