Do forums still get any search traffic whatsoever?

[Hanuman]

Reddit, Quora, Stackexchange, and maybe a few extremely high authority industry forums apart, are there any regular mid-sized forums that still get decent search traffic?

I looked up BuiltWith for some of the most popular message boards built on PHPBB, BuddyPress, etc., and the search traffic to these websites seems laughably low.

Edit: I am looking at a few industry leaders (like community.whattoexpect.com which is BIG among new mommies)- this gets a nice 200K per month organic traffic. But even here, traffic has been steadily dipping.

 

[secretagentdad]

No, forums are straight up devalued and pushed down. It’s bullshit and unamerican.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google wants to trust the content they rank. They do that by at least having a stated author who's responsible for the editorial standards and that people can check up on to verify the claims about who they are.

While you can do some of that with user-generated content, there's no real editorial oversight going on. Any dummy on the planet can type anything they want and their motivations are often not to be truthful but to attract attention and gain reputation by collecting internet points.

UGC isn't low-trust, it's no-trust. I can often find answers to things in forums but that's only after opening a dozen threads and weeding out the nonsense and wrong answers. I agree with not surfacing forums for regular queries unless they're modified to obviously be seeking forum content.

Another problem is forums have crap on-page SEO too. Running a forum for the sake of search traffic is the wrong thing to do.

Quora and Stack-Exchange aren't forums. I'd wager they're classified as Q&A (question and answer) sites, and the ability to upvote the good and downvote the bad and even have the OP select the best answer is a bit of that editorial oversight Google is looking for, which explains why they perform better than forums.

 

[contract]

For me, forums are the best source of content since it's written by actual people who enjoy a certain topic, and not these profit-focused blogs who simply are trying to rank for a topic. You can't google "xyz reviews" and see legitimate reviews, it's all fake. But on forums, you can find where people have asked about "xyz products" and see people venting and praising with no motive (usually).

Plus, most blog content these days is just almost "bot" written in a sense. No one is real, or an enthusiast, it's all contracted writing. Forums are a relic of those old days...

I tried forums, and even with vBSEO and lots of tweaks, etc. nothing ever ranked as well as Q&A, blog or magazine, etc. content. That's even after removing all the dead links, duplicate pages, etc that plague most forum platforms.

The real value of forums isn't traffic, it's the"active users". I've seen a lot of the traffic can be some super duper long tails, that are just odd ball searches. Visitors stop by and if they aren't a "xyz specific" person they leave, or if it's a general forum, they just don't care to participate. It's why a ton of forums were pushing so hard for user signs ups back in the day.

I remember when I had vb3 and 4 licenses, vBSEO, and what not. Custom themes, etc. Good times.

 

[tyealia]

Google absolutely hates forums since 2018, went from forums on page 1 to forums completely gone reddit/quora is not part of that hate, good theory from RYU with the upvotes.

Debatably one of the best ways to keyword research is to find keywords with forums ranking or quora since you know they are getting artificially suppressed and writing and article, even rewriting some of the quora posts can have you rank over their content.

 

[contract]

Also wanted to note that vBulletin pissed off a LOT of developers when IB or whatever took over the company. vB 3-4 was a nightmare for devs I heard from. I bet some of those devs ended up working at Google at some point Not saying that's why they aren't ranking well, but perhaps a reason. Over the years nothing compared to vBulletin.

Also the amount of forums that get hacked is just insane. I can't remember a period when there wasn't an active vBulletin board that was 100% non-vulnerable.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I bet some of those devs ended up working at Google at some point

The good devs from vBulletin actually went on to recreate their work with all they learned to make Xenforo.

 

[secretagentdad]

Since we’re on a the topic good time to stump for flarum.

https://flarum.org/

Best free software I’ve seen in ages with a great community. HMU if you get stuck.

 

[ashley]

Google wants to trust the content they rank. They do that by at least having a stated author who's responsible for the editorial standards and that people can check up on to verify the claims about who they are.

While you can do some of that with user-generated content, there's no real editorial oversight going on. Any dummy on the planet can type anything they want and their motivations are often not to be truthful but to attract attention and gain reputation by collecting internet points.

UGC isn't low-trust, it's no-trust. I can often find answers to things in forums but that's only after opening a dozen threads and weeding out the nonsense and wrong answers. I agree with not surfacing forums for regular queries unless they're modified to obviously be seeking forum content.

Another problem is forums have crap on-page SEO too. Running a forum for the sake of search traffic is the wrong thing to do.

Quora and Stack-Exchange aren't forums. I'd wager they're classified as Q&A (question and answer) sites, and the ability to upvote the good and downvote the bad and even have the OP select the best answer is a bit of that editorial oversight Google is looking for, which explains why they perform better than forums.

Apologies for rehashing an old thread. What about ugc in the form of moderated blog comments, especially comments that can be up voted? I’m considering allowing comments on my product review site, since this is the type of product that people like to talk about.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Apologies for rehashing an old thread. What about ugc in the form of moderated blog comments, especially comments that can be up voted? I’m considering allowing comments on my product review site, since this is the type of product that people like to talk about.

Google likes blog comments. I've ranked on the power of the hundreds of comments posts would get, because in some cases they act as validation to Google that the content is useful. And if you moderate them and remove all the spam links and even change people's wordings (so you avoid keyword stuffing and all that), you can really add a lot of valuable content to a page. Google does know the difference between the main content and the comments, but value is value.

Just because you have comments (user generated content) on a page doesn't mean you'll rank for queries that UGC content ranks for. If you have "main content" then you'll end up classified as a page with editorial content, even with the comments. Comments are good if you want to deal with them. I turned them off like 7 years ago and never looked back. If your project will benefit from the time it will take you to deal with them, then it's worth it. Like a database driven product comparison site would definitely benefit. A content site will benefit too, but not enough to warrant me dealing with it, in my opinion and those of all the zillion sites now that don't have comments.

 

[ashley]

Google likes blog comments. I've ranked on the power of the hundreds of comments posts would get, because in some cases they act as validation to Google that the content is useful. And if you moderate them and remove all the spam links and even change people's wordings (so you avoid keyword stuffing and all that), you can really add a lot of valuable content to a page. Google does know the difference between the main content and the comments, but value is value.

Just because you have comments (user generated content) on a page doesn't mean you'll rank for queries that UGC content ranks for. If you have "main content" then you'll end up classified as a page with editorial content, even with the comments. Comments are good if you want to deal with them. I turned them off like 7 years ago and never looked back. If your project will benefit from the time it will take you to deal with them, then it's worth it. Like a database driven product comparison site would definitely benefit. A content site will benefit too, but not enough to warrant me dealing with it, in my opinion and those of all the zillion sites now that don't have comments.

thanks - back in the day when I had blogs I'd get the worst most horrific (putting it kindly) comments on fairly benign posts - I got some good advice from someone about how to auto moderate comments followed by a va for manual moderation so i don't have to deal with the bizarre inane comments. I do think there's value for this in my niche, at some point I'd love more ugc (forum perhaps) for user retention/loyalty even though ugc/loyalty doesn't lead to more revenues, but offers value in other ways

Really appreciate your replies.