Thin Content & Duplicate Content - SEO On Forums in 2021

[ProCom]

Where are all you guys at these days with your thoughts, concerns, and actions relative to thin & duplicate content in forums and UGC (user gen content)?

There seem to be two schools of thought:

• More content is always better. There may be some long-tail stuff that could be valuable. Google will sort it all out in the end.
• Google does an OK job, but they aren't perfect. They have limited crawl budget, they don't like thing or duplicate content, and they want sites to have fewer "better" content items than more "mixed-quality" items.

Some forum owners will "no-index" thin content automatically. Some may try to do the same with duplicate content.

What do the "experts" say?

... or are all the experts only familiar with blogs and not forums?

What's your perspective / process on thin & duplicate UGC?

 

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I think the non indexing is important if you have many thin threads in your forums.
Google will suspect your forum to be spam forum if many threads are made up of tiny and rather hilarious contents.

Now, the tricky part is determining quality threads and thin ones.
Here are the two case scenarios -
A thread with just one post and no reply, but the users aim his views on a subject. Because he was saying his mind the content is likely unique and quality.

A thread with many replies but it turned out that the user just shared a funny picture he saw on another site. The replies which may be many turn out to be aggregate of trash replies. You know, something like
'Lol you are funny'
'Lol'
' funny picture'
Etc.

You can see you may set non index on the first case and index the second.

 

[Imgbi]

The answer to the ever content duplication question.
Forums are viewed as social media not just a media system like news sited and blogs, the above implies that forums are not mostly supposed to be the origin of topics and news but an expansion of existing news, topics contents.

I have seen many forums whose contents are from existing news sites and blogs.
Contents from those sites (with their source links of course) are discussed by the users. Those forums at the end of the day will outrank the original source.

I don't know if I am the only one that noticed Google latest updates liking forum posts.
I noticed this on pc searches only.