Do search engines look at forums and blogs differently?

[Jason76]

Possibly grammar, unique content, and spelling are looked at differently for forums and blogs, with blogs getting a tougher go thru. However, though, I suspect the comments in blogs are not looked at harshly either.

For instance, @Empire's forum is said to rank well, but obviously, people are free to say what they want. Also, I've seen blogs that seemed to be favored by search engines and the comment section is obviously not monitored.

 

[Page]

If an website or an blog tends to have bad grammar then search engines won'y understand and so it will rank bad. For me it doesn't help as I'm bad at darn crazy grammar.

Also you want to have it open as much as you can for search engines to read.

 

[RH-Calvin]

Comments in blogs are never looked after. So they are considered less value if you prefer to build links from comments.

 

[Jason76]

Comments in blogs are never looked after. So they are considered less value if you prefer to build links from comments.

It might be the case that forums and blog comments are given less value or ignored in terms of grammar, spelling, and original content. Obviously, search engines know those places cannot be controlled - at least not without being unreasonable.

 

[Corzhens]

I think it depends on the activity of both comparands. Given a situation that they are on even footing in terms of content, I guess the ranking will be the same. Yesterday, I was searching for info about a particular item in a Korean visa application form. My search brought me to a blog. Oh, it has a kilometric page due to the countless of comments. Maybe those comments were the reason why the ranking of such site was good, it was on page 1 of the search engine list.

 

[Mr.Bishop]

Possibly grammar, unique content, and spelling are looked at differently for forums and blogs, with blogs getting a tougher go thru. However, though, I suspect the comments in blogs are not looked at harshly either.

For instance, @Empire's forum is said to rank well, but obviously, people are free to say what they want. Also, I've seen blogs that seemed to be favored by search engines and the comment section is obviously not monitored.

100% they do.

Google used to really juice up forums, and there's some cases where they do really well still... but for the most part google changed what the favored to really have authorative, researched single-page content score well. Forums you have to pick through the thread to get an answer, a really well-written blog post is the end answer of that topic.

So right now blogs have a massive opportunity over forums, though the downside for blogs is you need to actually create all that content with writers.

 

[daulapis.a]

Blogs are highly more prioritised nowadays. Yes, grammar matters heavily as well. Comments and content creation will greatly help to both, though.

 

[KnownSyntax]

Depends, blogs have more quality to their content, thus better PR ranking per page with more exclusive content.
Forums have more unique content as each post is unique, although they lack the exclusive content and suffer in PR In that manner. For generic targeting, forums have the upper hand due to more unique content. For something specific, blogs have the upper hand due to better keyword usage per each blog page.

 

[skyler jones]

In my personal opinion,they do. Search engine probably gives more relevance to blogs compared to forum postings.Forum posting have unfortunately got bad reputation of being used for building low quality spammy backlinks .Thats why probably the diminishing value in search engine ranking.

 

[MrDangem]

Before i've made a blog about general topics and made an effort in SEO then I got a lot of traffic from google.
Now, im managing a forum and as usual made an effort in SEO and now I got traffic from google.
90% of my traffics are from Google.

 

[Nomad]

I have blogs. I did try forums but did not succeed. Since I do not have much experience with forum, I cannot say whether google treats forums and blogs differently. Some people say google is hard on forums because of the content quality and some say if your forum has a lot of activities and also has quality content, it will be loved by Google. I guess, how Google treats a forum and blog depends on the quality of content and seo efforts.

 

[Jason76]

I placing a highly probable guess that all these little details don't matter much. In fact, if a forum, or blog for that matter, has high domain authority - along with high "other metrics" (stuff from Majestic, SEM Rush etc.), it will rank.

 

[Carlos X]

No. They're one and the same to Google and other search engines. This can be confirmed by Threadloom's C.E.O. According to him, Google doesn't see your forum as a forum, but rather a website. My conversation with him was surprising, and I try to understand how to get over this thought pattern of Google.

 

[Azareal]

How about doing both? Try to use one to supplement the other?

 

[Azareal]

No. They're one and the same to Google and other search engines. This can be confirmed by Threadloom's C.E.O. According to him, Google doesn't see your forum as a forum, but rather a website. My conversation with him was surprising, and I try to understand how to get over this thought pattern of Google.

From the bot's perspective, every website is the same, however the nature of the traffic from one and the word density differences probably makes a fair bit of difference. You also have to keep in mind that forums have "content fragmented" across multiple pages.

In the modern day, Google *can* tell posts from one user apart from another user due to the markup used on the page, while in the past, it would have seen them as one block of text, another block of text, and yet another one.

Generally speaking though, Google wants to give people what they want. If people ask for a solution or answer, it wants an answer, not people beating around the bush.

 

[Jason76]

I'm unsure about the role of spelling and grammar - but obviously, popular forums cannot police those things and they get big traffic - but not sure if from search engines.