mySQL - rename Post `title` to match Thread `title`

[Rik Brown]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

99% of the post on a typical forum does not have a title. What you are doing now is only increasing your database size (probably a lot even) with duplicate data.

Marco:

I'd just assume not debate SEO matters in this thread. Suffice it to say that we have seen our largest ever jump in average daily traffic of over 400% in less than 2 months when we started working on this project. The difference (increase) in traffic is larger than our entire forum growth going back more than a few years.

I might mention that our sitemap software creates a URL reference for EVERY page of our site. Google Analytics shows us that people are not always entering our site via the top of a thread. Instead, they enter at an indexed page of the thread that Google or another engine "likes." Those page titles ARE being indexed in Google. I can track them back and see for myself.

I also might add that since we can now mass change post titles, we have played with them doing things like adding a single keyword to titles in a specific forum (say dealing with Cars) and watching the effect. Normally, within about 4 days of propagating our new sitemaps, we'll find those particular posts climbing quickly up in our internal Google Analytics rankings and bypassing those posts (in the same forum) for which we didn't change the titles in the same manner.

We have found the growth to be so fast paced that we don't worry about thousands of threads/posts (out of about 1.4 million posts) temporarily dropping out of Google etc. due to being renamed -- as we know that they will come back within a week or so at a much higher ranking.

So all I can say is that this is working fantastically for our forums and nothing we have done in the past has even had a fraction of this effect. Its quite a thrill to see new record highs in traffic virtually daily and huge jumps week-to-week. We're loving it!

So let's agree to disagree!

Cheers! -- Rik

ps: I guess I should also mention that we use vbseo to name our thread URLs to match their titles.

[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.

[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