There is an interesting thread going on at the WebmasterWorld forum looking at whether or not Google favors forums in search results. Matt Cutts tells me that he can neither confirm nor deny this. The thread is started by someone with the handle “bouncybunny,” who posts:
Once it was directories, then blogs, now forums… maybe.
I have no empirical evidence for this, but it seems to me that Google is increasingly returning results from forum posts…
The thread did provoke a few responses of note. For example, SEO consultant Jaan Kanellis says, “It is normal for Google to favor forum threads for certain queries. Naturally websites do not optimize themselves for long-tail queries that forums are automatically optimized for by way of user-generated content.”
WebmasterWorld founder Brett Tabke himself chimed in, “Since Google clearly devalued links from blogs last year, they devalued forums as well. It has been my experience that most inbound links on forums come from blogs. The top 30 forums last year all lost 1 to 2 pr points on the green fairy dust bar.”
When it comes down to it, webmasters will probably do well to not harp on things like this too much, and put more effort into the user experience of their own sites. As discussed repeatedly, traditional SEO tactics aren’t necessarily as likely to be as helpful moving forward as simply improving your site’s quality.
