[Rik Brown]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

I am not a SEO expert, so can not really comment on that. But it does surprise me that setting the title on each post on the thread (page) helps. The thread title once on a page should be enough i would guess.

Hi, Marco:

I would agree with that if users always came in at the top of the thread. But with Google sitemaps from vbseo, every page gets indexed separately and users are very likely to be referred to us in the middle of the thread (vbseo embeds permalinks, etc. for each post that again matches up with the post/thread titles and the vbseo-created sitemaps).

However, one very interesting thing we have found is that it appears Google often analyzes the number of posts in a thread and is often (not always) more likely to index threads with less posts than large megathreads. It sometimes even totally skips indexing some of those larger threads (but we do see notable exceptions that we can't yet explain on our site).

I don't have a number here but we often see threads with say 60-120-250 posts that get virtually no indexing or even totally bypassed (Google may somehow pay attention to the post counts) while the smaller threads on the same day are indexed and produce considerable incoming search engine traffic.

I'm just guessing that Google, like most users, knows that some of those large threads tend to have a lot of junk in them so they don't even go down those roads or Google simply puts such megathreads at a much lower priority for indexing (at least in regards to our site).

So we are going to be experimenting on some of our larger threads by paring them back from say 250 messages to lesser amounts (perhaps in increments of 60 -> 45 -> 30 -> 25 -> 20 messages) and see if their search engine popularity increases.

If we are right, in those cases, "less will be more" for us and help us clean dead-weight or polluting messages from our forums while further increasing our overall traffic.

Cheers! -- Rik