Does Google really hate forums?

[Cedric]

I wanted to bring up a topic that I'm sure many of us have heard before: the idea that Google "hates" forums. It's a common complaint among webmasters and forum owners, but is there any truth to it?

On one hand, it's true that forums can be more difficult to rank in search engines than other types of websites. They often have a lot of user-generated content, which can be less organized and less focused than the content on other types of sites. Plus, forums can sometimes be a breeding ground for spam, which can hurt their reputation with search engines.

But does this mean that Google really hates forums? Are forums doomed to never rank well in search engine results, no matter what we do?

I'm interested to hear what you all think about this. Have you had trouble getting your forum to rank well in search engines? Do you think that Google really has it out for forums, or is there something else going on here? And if you have been able to get your forum to rank well in search engines, what strategies did you use?

Let's have an open discussion about this and see if we can come up with some insights that will help us all improve our forum's visibility in search engines!

 

[Cory]

I wouldn't necessarily say Google "hates" forums, but for some of the reasons you mentioned, it's just harder to rank well with forums rather than most websites. I've always had a fairly terrible ranking from Google, then again I'm using Jcink which doesn't give many SEO optimization features for better ranking. So, I think it can be dependent on which forum software you use as well. Some forums will pop up as the first result when you search specific keywords, I'm sure. It takes a lot of factors to dictate whether Google will rank your forum well or not.

 

[Arantor]

I don't think Google hates forums. I think Google is ambivalent: it does not *care* about forums.

Consider what Google's mission is, it sells ads. Anything else is a distraction. Even search, the thing that put them on the map, exists to funnel people at ads. The space on the average search engine results page is hot property. Page 1 of any search gets eyeballs. It always will.

What Google identified is that the most lucrative ad spots, the ones that most people will pay more money for, are on authoritative, quality traffic sites. They worked out a long time ago what some semi-objective measure of authoritativeness looks like. And Google is about the most data-led company going, if it can't be quantified and analysed and metricised, they're not interested. As a result, they have data that biases their views based on what that authoritativeness looks like, and they reasoned from their data that user-generated content objectively performs less well in terms of authoritativeness. They understand that for certain types of content, certain outlier sites exist - Stack Overflow for example - though even that still follows their operational behaviours where people link back to Stack Overflow and co automatically follow the 'linking back' that sits at the heart of Google's PageRank.

Now, if your forum exists as an authority of any level in a niche, it absolutely can perform better than its peers, and as they say you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the person next to you also being chased by the bear.

This is why sites creating articles perform objectively better than sites which don't engage at all; Google can spot a forum a mile off, but article pages in a forum don't read like a forum post. It's content that can be linked to and can be identified as non-UGC that is worth referring potential users to.

 

[Jason]

Sites that are interesting and draw in backlinks on it's own, without the site owner making them, is the way to go. In that case, I don't see why a super-awesome forum wouldn't rank. Anyway, though, to make a really good site - that is a powerhouse, you probably need a lot of money, my guess.

 

[joelr]

Almost 80% of my new traffic is from Google.

Google doesn't "hate" you because you're a forum. Google hates you because you don't offer unique, compelling, authoritative content when compared to the entire web. If you do, Google will love you.

 

[Tracy]

Google doesn't "hate" you because you're a forum. Google hates you because you don't offer unique, compelling, authoritative content when compared to the entire web. If you do, Google will love you.

Google will tend to like an article over a post with the same topics... but you can, even if you are a small site, get good page ranking with good content in a forum using a topic title that makes for a good search term especially in your niche... like pixinsight vs startools. Of course, you need content to back that topic title up, just like with an article.

 

[Heatman]

I would say that when your forum meets the certain requirements by Google for it to rank higher, there's no algorithm that's set to stop that. Even though forums are a bit different from other websites, it doesn't mean that Google hates them and would work against them growing in terms of ranking.