Some points from a discussion on setting up a new forum.
The steps to take to get started and make it successful:
Tag: forum
I’m a moderator on a few forums, one phpBB and the rest are vBulletin. One was a surprise – I hadn’t realised until I started getting reported posts 😉
Personally I find the vBulletin forums better to moderate than phpBB but it’s a relatively close call – until you start banning people and looking for cheats. Then vBulletin comes into it’s own.
A while back I mentioned how a short lived forum demo lasted months in the SERPs. Another effect I’ve found with new sites is that the sites you use for dropping links will kick butt in the SERPs for a couple of weeks until the search engines fully index and propogate the results around the data centers.
A couple of weeks is no biggie and eventually you’ll pop out on top. The thing is, you drop the links from sites you know are indexed well because they’re going to help you and quickly.
So, I was amused to see, on a forum I frequent, that one site owner was requesting link exchanges and a site review for his Nintendo Wii site.
SEO experts despair! I launched a small forum recently and as I mucked about at Open Source CMS trying to decide which software to use I renamed the test category “SH20 Activists”.
Open Source CMS refresh their test systems every hour so I know that the forum lasted no more than 60 minutes, and probably considerably less!