Forum homepage SEO

[nims]

I have noticed that while creating backlinks or submitting our forum to other directories and search engines we usually link to the home page of our forum like -http://www.mysite.com/forum/

Now a good SEO says "content on your web-pages to be promoted should be good, relevant and should be regularly updated". When I see the home page of phpbb forum, I see that the content remains same ( to a large extent ) and if you are dealing with few different topics the home page will show the forums of different interest and area thus diluting the overall strength of the page.

So wudnt it be great if we cud add some dynamic relevant content on our forum home page ?

[dcz]

Well, links are content too.

phpBB index is doing a great job for what it is meant : list all forums and descriptions.
For sure it's not like the ideal SEO page, but it's really the forum's starting page, the one linked from all pages and thus supposed to end up with the most PR.

This particular page is not the one supposed to show up on precise search queries, but it's the page from where PR will be transmitted to forums and topics.

And it's a good thing to have a page on which concentrate backlinks like this, because you cannot make backlinks to all your topics and forums in every directory, and if you do optimize on anything else but forum index for the forum, the page will be necessarily less linked in the forum itself and will not be linked, thus transmit PR, to all forums.

phpBB index is a door, not a page with content, but it's very useful as is.

As you can see on most forums, the index is the page with greatest PR, so it far from bots not liking it.

PageRank transmission is not really dilution, you're giving this PR to yourself in this case and you need to start from somewhere to do so.

For sure, the forum index could be more dynamic with mods like last active topic on index, but this mod is adding some process, which can be an issue on very large boards.

Content on index is in forum description, this is something to pay attention to when writing those.

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[nims]

Ya I see your point but still I think the index page if made little dynamic would be a good food for the bots but at the same time keeping it light is also reqd.

Cant we have a hack to add a link to the new topic posted ( its subject/title only ) below the description of the forum. It wud be great with only few queries to get the latest topic title. What do you say ?

[dcz]

Today at yesterday at is what I say

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[nims]

Great I will check that out thanks