Forum indexing

[rundie]

Bloggers somewhat have the advantage of an RSS feed, which makes indexing a lot easier, and they can also sign up for those auto-PING sites. Forums, though, are a lot tougher to get indexed in my experience, although perhaps I just haven't used the right tools? I know that google gets to forums eventually, and I know about sites like big boards et al, but are there any other ways to get your forum "optimized" as it were?

[Michael_Knight]

You should use a robots.txt file on your index pages. It's a txt file that allows search engines to spider your site. You can use commands like: which will crawl your entire site, so id get familiar with the disallow command too.

More info here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360

[rundie]

Thanks a ton for this, I'll look into it

[wilson2]

You can fetch your forum posts through rss however if you've a blog it would be much easier to promote your content.

[AndrewJ]

Most forum software generates rss feeds so you could go to feeddigest or similar and group the feeds into one single feed. Then burn the feed at feedburner.

Andrew

[Passmark]

Having lot of incoming links (i.e. a popular site) helps a lot to get your forum indexed. Using a forum package that is SEO friendly from the start also helps.

You can also create a Google Site Map which lists all the pages on your site (including the forum posts).

Despite the advice above, having a robots.txt file normally doesn't help get a site indexed. As Google states , "If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one)".

[cscgal]

As DaveSinkula loves to point out to me, RSS feeds were designed with blogs in mind and therefore don't translate so well into forums ... the only way to set it up while conforming to RSS standards is based on new threads as opposed to new posts or last updated threads, which can make them lose partial functionality for those who want to use the feeds as a way of following the forums.