how many topics on the first page

[rick74]

Hello,

How many topics should be the best to put on you topic pages of the forum.
I have now 20, but i also see forums with 60.

[HB]

I suppose it depends on the typical length of a post. If members tend to go on and on, a small number of posts per page is justified. Lots of one liners (as might be the case for roll playing forums) would justify a much higher posts per page count.

For articles, I use 700-1000 words per page as my personal rule of thumb; looking at a couple three column layout websites, around 500 words per page seems to be favored, or two presses of the Page Down key to traverse from top to bottom. Although forums tend to be longer because of their layout, that gives you an idea of what typical web readers expect.

My forum started at 15 posts per page and later I changed it to 20. That's enough for running several ads between posts without two appearing on the same page (e.g., after the second and tenth and optionally before the last one). Unless you have lots one liners, 60 per page would be way too many.

[dcz]

I think rick meant topic per page.

In this case, it's less important, but still.

phpBB default on install is 50, but most forums are using 25, as phpBB.com is doing.

It's a bit less work for the server to query for 25 topics than to do it for 50.

SEO wise, we all know we should not go over about a 100 links per pages, so it's a parameter we can play with to control the number of links on our forum pages.

Les topic per page increases the number of pages in the forum, and one could think, and it is right, that the first page being the most Ranked, more topic in here would end up in a better PageRank transmission.
But, this is a bit less important with the phpBB SEO solutions, because pagination gets PageRanked too. Right now :
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-forum-vf30/ PR4
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-forum-vf30-25/ PR3
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-forum-vf30-50/ PR3
...
http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/phpbb-forum-vf30-125/ PR3

Only the last one isn't ranked yet, since it's too new.

On the other hand, more page is not the worst thing for a website, and forum pagination cannot be avoided, and without duplicates, they are still worth something SEO wise.

So, the user experience should as well be taken into account I think. I am not really found of huge lists, to me 50 is a bit to much, but, this is more a preference than a SEO tip.

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