On that note, I wonder if the content in your articles was instead in a page node, if there would be a traffic increase. One would assume a page is > than an article which is > than a forum post, but who knows I guess.
We have an article forum (so all articles, not mixed with other thread types) that's basically a blog of one member's cancer experiences. Instead of having it in the Forum List, I put it on it's navigation bar tab to give it some prominence. Still didn't attract too much attention, even from members who knew about her cancer, after the first month or so. No idea about SEO since I don't look too closely at that stuff.
This isn't really related to articles SEO but one issue that I still haven't found a great solution to is users not finding certain content that they would want to see if they knew it existed. Even with links in the navigation bar.
I can't say I obsess over SEO myself, but I've seen some threads or articles that I felt would interest members, get essentially overlooked, with not much view activity, and pull in nobody new from a search engine. Part of the problem with one of my forums is that since it started as a guestbook 26 or 27 years ago (and changed to a forum in 1997), it has been stuck on certain subjects all that time and it's difficult to get out of that rut. In other words, someone coming in blind assumes we're mainly talking about one decade of the topic, where any decade is encouraged.
That is difficult for anyone. I thought of emphasizing content in the sidebar more, perhaps adding sidebars elsewhere than on the main page. I also tried a series of "trending" widgets with an addon that was thrown behind a $1,000 paywall (and honestly, I didn't care much for how it worked since configuration options were too limited). XF really could use a native "Trending" widget that worked properly and had a full set of configuration options. (I've already suggested it.) That still won't solve our problem, but it's one way to get some interesting content bubbling to the top.
Cant find your suggestion? I would vote for it.
I can't find it either--I may be thinking of another suggestion I made for something else. However, maybe I am thinking of someone else who posted a similar idea, which means I probably passed up suggesting it since it already was out there. This is the one I voted on a while ago:
xenforo.com
