How to improve your forum SEO and Average Position ranking

joroom

Active member
So yeah, this is the question.

I am using XF2.0.2 with the default theme. Didnt change anything. As of yesterday i have 24 urls returning an index error with a soft 404.

What can i do to improve my average position ranking which is now 25.3 knowing that:

. Forum has been online since 2004
. Has lots of data (around 2M posts)
. Updates are daily with a good amount of members contributing.

Anything maybe that slipped my radar? that i can use to improve this ?

Screen Shot 2018-02-02 at 11.58.52 PM.webp
 
You're already doing great with lots of clicks and impressions already. My google analytics / webmaster tools doesn't look like that tho hmmm... In comparison for a 28 day period I have 20k clicks, 7.6% CTR and Average Position 14.1. We have 40k posts, 5k threads, 88k users.

Forums are typically filled with "thin content", meaning pages with little actual text content. People are searching to find information, if the pages have little information they don't have value to the user and google won't rank them well. The best way to increase page rank and therefore CTR is to increase the amount of copy (text) on your board.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel tho. I've had good results with this method. Re-read the "good" part, keep expectations realistic.

Find your top 50 top landing pages/threads
Sort them by highest position and look at the top 25
These are pages that are doing ok but not great and will be easy to capitalize on.

Every day, pick one of these threads and do a little on page SEO. Checkout what keywords bring people to it. Focus on long keywords (like a phrase instead of a word) and unique keywords for your content. Make sure the keywords are in the thread title and once or twice sprinkled throughout the thread. If you can somehow put 2 different long chain keywords in the title, that's even better. Add pictures, format the text nicely with bolding and paragraphs. Implode the content, meaning add more text/information to it. Focus on tutorials and guides. Or turn a big thread with multiple pages into a guide by combining all the best content into one post and moving it to the beginning of the thread. Be very careful with keyword stuffing, seriously don't use the same keyword more than a 2 times in a small post, or 3-4 times in a large post you will get de-ranked by google and it will be very painful. People use many different searched to get to your landing page, you can rank for several long chain keywords instead of the same one over and over again and avoid keyword stuffing.

I don't know how much time you have but if you can commit 1 hour a day and take your the bottom half of your 50 best pages and turn them from rank 15 on the second page to rank 5 on the first page of google, you will see a good improvement.

Depending on the topic of your board, you can contract people on Fiverr to write stuff for you for cheap, just make sure it's decent.

I'm no expert but I've done my research and find this to be a "good" way to do SEO.
 


Check the URLs for those soft 404s.

Tags are examples of pages that have no content. They are real pages but there's nothing there to index. Thus, Google labels them as soft 404s. Solution: Disallow indexing of tags in your robots.txt file or just turn off tags entirely: really, they serve no useful purpose these days.
 


Check the URLs for those soft 404s.

Tags are examples of pages that have no content. They are real pages but there's nothing there to index. Thus, Google labels them as soft 404s. Solution: Disallow indexing of tags in your robots.txt file or just turn off tags entirely: really, they serve no useful purpose these days.
Is that common knowledge that the XF tags system has no function in search indexing? I am getting the 404s on tags, but they all seem to be from content that we removed via spam.
 

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Tags are examples of pages that have no content. They are real pages but there's nothing there to index. Thus, Google labels them as soft 404s. Solution: Disallow indexing of tags in your robots.txt file or just turn off tags entirely: really, they serve no useful purpose these days.
Totally agree. Tag pages are terrible little things. I've never had any type of them help any ranking on any website I've ever owned. They've only brought rankings down, whether it be Wordpress software or some other type. It's a shame too because I enjoy categorizing things. Tags seem like a great way to do that beyond traditional category pages. Steer clear from tags.
 
Is that common knowledge that the XF tags system has no function in search indexing? I am getting the 404s on tags, but they all seem to be from content that we removed via spam.
Xenforo tag pages are useful for internal search within the Xenforo software itself (internal search uses the tag phrases as part of the search function), but they can be detrimental if search engine crawlers get hold of them. For many sites (especially if they don't have a lot of authority), tag pages can bring down rankings tremendously. My advice would be to delete all tags and then turn the system completely off. And in no way ever let a user input their own tags on your website. I've got so much miserable experience with tags. It's not fun to think about.
 
Totally agree. Tag pages are terrible little things. I've never had any type of them help any ranking on any website I've ever owned. They've only brought rankings down, whether it be Wordpress software or some other type. It's a shame too because I enjoy categorizing things. Tags seem like a great way to do that beyond traditional category pages. Steer clear from tags.
I have a silly problem where my tag pages rank on Google but my actual articles don't for some keywords. It's frustrating
 
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