As I have been saying since the 90s, all SEO for forums starts with on page SEO — and it's not initially about user generated content but about things like
- site title
- site description
- titles/names of categories
- description of each category
- titles/names of nodes
- description of each node
- make sure that the descriptions are always visible, not tooltips or popups, and that they are visible to non-logged in guests (searchbots)
- do the same for subforums/subnodes
- to an extent, the order of your nodes: move the chatter stuff to the bottom, not at the top of the categories
- check the box for specific nodes to NOT index the chatter stuff — index the meat of the site, not the silly stuff that doesn't even represent what your forums are about
- always use seo-friendly URLs
These are all opportunities to get a variety of defining and relevant search terms in front of search bots. In today's world of search term generated search results, this is critical.
Set up a Google Search Console account for your XF site and manually submit a sitemap to kickstart crawling.
Create a robots.txt file like this to filter out duplicates:
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /whats-new/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /goto/
Disallow: /posts/
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /members/
Disallow: /admin.php
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /editprefix
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://{your domain}.com/sitemap.xml
Then review your GSC results on a semi-regular basis looking for where you need to improve titles and descriptions.