ONLY index Topics IF count words > XXX

[Durango]

Hi everyone

We are SEO professionals, and as many of you know, content is king

The problem with communities is that many users create topics with 5 words and nobody replies to it

so it generates thousands of "empty" pages >> this leads to a Google Panda penalty

We have detected this problem on many (small or large) Invision Board communities but not only, also on Xenforo, PHPBB, Vbulletin communities, same problem

The minimum count words for a quality page is at least 200 words of UNIQUE content (some would say 400)

Hopefully there is one solution to this problem :

Add a NOINDEX by default to all topics if count_words < 200 words, and IF count_words > 200 words then remove this NOINDEX

 

Has anyone developed this for his board ? Who can do this ? an official solution ? tx ! :)

@Lindy @Charles

 

[Aiwa]

1 hour ago, Durango said:

We are experts in SEO

I'm sorry, any time someone opens with this line my eyes have to roll.  Anyone saying they are experts in SEO usually means they have security clearance to Area 51.  So, what color are the Aliens? Do they have tenticles?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing anything you've said. I just find anyone claiming to be an "expert", about something that's quite subjective, to be rather amusing.

[Chris Anderson]

Just because a forum posting has between 200 and 400 hundred written words doesn’t mean that the posting has any meaningful value to the community or to the billions of Internet users (which is the “real” reason search engines index forums). 

People are becoming increasingly indoctrinated to communicate (via social media sites) with the fewest words possible, as such, they are forgetting to write in a manner that encourages thoughtful and meaningful dialog.  Overusing symbols, emoticons, emojis, slang, abbreviations, quotes and embedded pictures and videos all tend to shorten the length and decrease the overall value of a particular conversation.  We aren’t charging our members by the word, so why are they so hesitant in using a few extra words here or there to better express themselves.  A well-expressed posting will invariably get more reads and follow-ups so it seems like it would be in the best interest of everyone if they upped their game when it came to writing.

We all should all strive to encourage our members to post “great” content that will encourage others to post even “greater” follow-up content.  Before you know it, each and every forum posting will exceed your requisite 200 to 400 word minimum without requiring any software intervention.  We should rely less on addressing problems like you noted in your posting via software engineering and look into how we can solve them via social engineering instead.

If a site doesn’t encourage lively and engaging dialogue within their community, maybe it is a good thing that they aren’t readily discoverable via the search engines.

[christopher-w]

Google, amongst others, now have the ability (with varying degrees of accuracy) to analyse meaning and sentiment in text, And consequently I should imagine word count is rapidly being relegated to a minor consideratIon when ranking content. 

But in saying that I see the typical quick fire 1 to 5 word forum response as a real annoyance, both as reader and forum provider. So whether  G or others mark you down for this or not, I’m looking at ways to reward more thoughtful input. Not saying of course that 50 words good, 5 words bad, but generally, on the forums I use, longer responses equal longer running threads. Which I see as a good thing.

 

[Durango]

On 8/26/2018 at 11:31 PM, Aiwa said:

I'm sorry, any time someone opens with this line my eyes have to roll.  Anyone saying they are experts in SEO usually means they have security clearance to Area 51.  So, what color are the Aliens? Do they have tenticles?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing anything you've said. I just find anyone claiming to be an "expert", about something that's quite subjective, to be rather amusing.

No worries, you're right, many people say they are SEO experts even if they are not

We are considered as SEO professionals as we are a SEO agency since 2006 with more than 800 clients (small, medium and very large websites) 

Also SEO is not "subjective" hopefully. SEO is a full time job, with lots of very objective criterias and rules to understand, follow and optimize. Even if nobody knows the exact formula of Google algorythm of course

On 8/27/2018 at 1:16 AM, Christopher Anderson said:

 

We all should all strive to encourage our members to post “great” content that will encourage others to post even “greater” follow-up content.  Before you know it, each and every forum posting will exceed your requisite 200 to 400 word minimum without requiring any software intervention.  We should rely less on addressing problems like you noted in your posting via software engineering and look into how we can solve them via social engineering instead.

If a site doesn’t encourage lively and engaging dialogue within their community, maybe it is a good thing that they aren’t readily discoverable via the search engines.

you're right, but it is more and more difficult to make people write great content, but that's the end goal

On 8/27/2018 at 9:05 AM, christopher-w said:

Google, amongst others, now have the ability (with varying degrees of accuracy) to analyse meaning and sentiment in text, And consequently I should imagine word count is rapidly being relegated to a minor consideratIon when ranking content. 

 

Actually it's not at all relegated to a minor consideration, see this recent study from Backlinko (famous SEO website) :

https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking

4. Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.

Most pages have 1000-1500 words at least when ranking on #1 position on Google

(and even >2000 words when huge keywords according to Semrush (another SEO professional tool)

Some discussions on Webmasterworld revealed many communities add a noindex to "thin content" topics, and removed the noindex when content is "rich" (at least 200, 300 or 400 words....)

Google Panda Penalty is not a myth, it's real

[Chris Anderson]

15 hours ago, Durango said:

We are experts in SEO

You may be considered an authority on SEO with your client base, but having a profile lacking any detail about you and you and your SEO company might put you in the position of not being taken as seriously as you might deserve. 

 

[Durango]

@Christopher Anderson : you're right, not communicating about our agency here is a choice

My only goal here is to optimize our IPB boards SEO

[christopher-w]

10 hours ago, Durango said:

Actually it's not at all relegated to a minor consideration, see this recent study from Backlinko (famous SEO website) :

https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking

Not sure something written in 2016 is particularly relevant today. There's plenty of more recent articles discussing Google's move to content analysis, plus Bing's incorporation of sentiment analysis since Jan/Feb this year. But as I said, I'm all for longer articles, but not for SEO reasons, whether Google favours them or not.

 

 

[Fast Lane!]

If you check for this, make sure you include not just the first post in a topic, but the second and third...  The check could be done after every new post or at the time the page is loaded (seems less desirable and more resource intensive).

[Durango]

It is still relevant today (more than ever)

If a page is thin then too many of these will affect your site through various algorithms (Google Panda mainly).

Adding a noindex to the thin pages will make sure they don't cause you problems and is the best and safest way to protect your site.

The question next is : why are there so many thin content topics on your board : change in user behavior, not enough answers, too many questions, you might need contributors etc etc

But noindex solves the biggest problem : avoiding Google thin content penalties

 

[Markus Jung]

There is a plugin for this:

 

[Elshara Silverheart]

Well let me say this.

Google doesn't know to look for your site, unless it is pinged and then regularly referenced using keywords, backlinks and pinged again. Then it keeps track of how many people actually visit by keeping tabs using a bot tracker.

Why do you think Word Press does so well? And IPBoard V3? Pings. Yes, they still work. And that's how news sites gets their stories published via RSS pings and site maps.

Having said that, to control what topics do crawl pings, is very important. But it's not as important, as Gooogle knowing that you have something available to ping. In fact a cron task should be added into the index XXX posts to make a ping request.

Now you're guaranteed, based on unique content, to be indexed in search. Get a few users participating in a topic with a ping crawler on it, and or set up a custom activity stream to manage topics or forums even with a minimum of 200 or 400 words per topic, and you're all set. This way it's all done via category permissions, and your results bring in many members through association.

This also makes your domain more desired because it increased its ranking as a whole. What ever google does, bing follows. In fact the primary use case scenario to add your site with Bing, Google, Yandex, Baidu etc, is so that the crawler keeps your domain in its list to check for new content.

So what I recommend, is that you include include in your official site map, forums or topics with longer post count requirements in them, and leave the rest up to search engines to see outside of any RSS feeds. AKA, move it to a private forum until it gets enough posts in it that it is moved again to public forums.