I am not sure about you, but Google sends me the vast majority of of my search engine traffic. I spend my SEO time making sure that Google loves me - as I bet many of you do as well. For some time there has been chatter about how Google sees the different forum versions that software like vBulletin creates of the same content. These different version are a value-added feature for vB users - they allow for printer-friendly versions, threaded view versions, text-based archive versions, and more, but are they affecting your rankings in Google?

The real question has been: Does Google see these different version as duplicate content? And if they do, are they penalizing my rankings because of it? And if they don’t, wouldn’t I be crazy to tell Google to not index these pages, therefore giving me fewer indexed pages (thus, fewer opportunities to be found in search results)?

Rest easy, Google to the rescue: (emphasis added)

What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

Two points for Google here: First, they at least state that much of the duplicate content issue isn’t intended. And second, they address forums specifically in their definition.

What does Google do about it?
During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.

Interesting. So what Google is saying is that the worst thing that will happen if you leave all your page versions to be indexed, is that Google may choose the wrong version to show visitors when they are routed through a search. This means that they won’t dock your rankings because of duplicate content, but they will choose which version that they consider appropriate.

Hmmm… so what does Google suggest that you do? Should you leave all your pages to be indexed - and therefore have more opportunities to be found a Google search?

How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?
* Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

Okay, so even though they say they won’t penalize you, they suggest that you choose ONE version to index and block the others. I don’t know about you, but I tend to follow what Google advises me to do. This actually came up at the Elite Retreat on Tuesday. I asked the question of Aaron Wall because I was curious what the author of the best SEO book on earth would say. He advised me to choose one version and block the rest. Since I can’t recall exact wording, I won’t misquote him here, but when Aaron speaks, I listen.

If you are interested in the full blog post by Google, you can read it here. There are a bunch of great tips on minimizing duplicate content issues that should be read and applied.

For me, I think that whenever possible, we should keep things simple. If an imperfect algorithm will be determining my rankings, it makes sense to be totally clear about what you want indexed. I would rather not leave any confusion about possible duplicate content, but beyond that, perhaps it’s not a good idea to bring in visitors off the archives when the view they gets doesn’t match the actual site. (I have to say that the Archives do make money, but I would rather have the long-term visitor that I may not be converting.)

What are your thoughts on this issue? What are you doing for your forum(s). Have you made changes and gotten results from them? I would love to hear the thoughts of other Admin on this issue as I think it’s an important one.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

A few months ago, I read a post about a service called Crazy Egg on Tech Crunch. Crazy Egg tracks visitor clicks and creates a great heatmap to show where click activity is happening. What I specifically like about this is that I can set it up to test with, say, 5,000 visitors, then make some changes in response to the feedback, then set it up again to test what effect my changes had. Often with other programs, you can spot problems or areas that need improvement, but it’s difficult to actually see how your changes affected user experience.

Here’s how it works (and why it’s different than Google Analytics), according to the developer:

With Crazy Egg, we are tracking the exact x,y coordinate of a click as well as form fields, submit buttons and other javascript on-click events. Google’s Site Overlay doesn’t track these things. We are also trying to display analytics data visually, through our overlay and heatmap to make it easier for everyone to learn and react to where their visitors are clicking.

I put it on my list of things to try, but I didn’t get around to that until yesterday. Boy, do I wish I did it sooner…

Things I like:

- There is a free version that gives you ample visits (5,000) to play with to see if it’s right for you.

- The plans are pretty cheap - we are doing the $19 per month plan with 25,000 visits tracked. (You do not need to track every visitor. After a certain number of responses, you will notice that the heatmap does not change substantially.)

- You can block specific IPs so the results are cleaner. It will also email people you would like blocked and give them a link to click to opt-out their IP.

- I love that there is just enough information presented, but not too much that it’s hard to make sense of it. It’s very possible to get too much information in stats programs and then not use any of it properly.

Things I don’t like:

- The reporting can be painfully slow to load. It hasn’t affected out load times, but when I go to view the results, I get frustrated at the speed of their website. (And at times it is down for maintenance.)

- Our drop down menus were NOT tracked - which is frustrating because that should be a main place to leave the homepage, but I don’t know how many people actually use it. (More on that below.)

Here are some things to keep in mind when you are interpreting your heatmap:

- Don’t be sad if most of your page is blank. This records CLICKS and not what people are actually reading. If only it could track time before clicks and user sessions, then I would be happy.

- This is NOT the only tool you should be using to try and improve user experience and maximize revenue - this is only thing in your arsenal. Make sure to compare results to your tracking software (Analytics offers some fairly in-depth results on lots of different variables.). Also consider user feedback (which is easy to get on a forum). And finally, if you are really interested, you could always perform some sort of eye tracking testing. (You have to be really hardcore for that one!)

- When you look at the hottest areas, keep in mind that these areas are exactly what your user most wants on your site. They actively pursued what was on the other side of that link. In the world of two second attention spans and millions of sites competing for our attention, *actually* clicking something is a huge deal and should be taken seriously!

- While you do know who is clicking what, you DON’T know why other stuff isn’t being clicked. You will have to use your best judgment on those links. If something isn’t being clicked that you feel is important, it’s time to make some changes and test again. You WILL be able to see if those changes improve the click-throughs on that link once you test again.

Here are the results from our first test at our laptop forum:

As you can see in the upper right corner, just below the logo, there are no clicks on the “Laptop Discussions” menu (only the Discussons and Photos links have menus in them). That drop down menu takes you straight to the forums and is probably the most-used area on the page (as confirmed by Google Analytics’ site overlay). Because no click is required to open the menu, no clicks are registered. This is a major letdown, but there is more to see on the page, so I press on…

My best observations:

- First, there are lots of improvements that can be made based on these results. We will make changes in the coming week or two and then test again. I will post the results when we do.

- I am surprised at how many visitors go straight to the forum search box located just below the banner. That was added after we launched the new design, and it’s the most-clicked item besides the log in boxes. Clearly, searching the forums right when they arrive is important to our visitors. I think that we should make sure that this forum search box is obvious - perhaps moving it to a more prominent position. How many visitors *don’t* see that box and leave when they don’t quickly find what they are looking for? The only way to know that is to tweak and then test again.

- In the same vein, I know that our search is not that great. It’s a weakness of vBulletin. Once you hit a certain post count (we are over 2,000,000 now), the search just doesn’t work that well. It concerns me to think that so many visitors try to search and probably don’t get the best results. This has worried me for some time, but this reminds me that we need to make sure there isn’t a way to improve the searching experience so we don’t loose visitors with short attention spans and the inability to dig in the forums for information.

- We added the three boxes at the top of the page with this redesign. They were put there to create ‘buckets’ to sort our visitors into. The idea is to satisfy the main needs of our users right when they get to the site. We know that our visitors (those who need navigational help - this doesn’t apply to regulars) are researching, shopping, or just looking for a forum about laptops. From this heatmap, that was clearly a good idea because they are being used. There are no clicks on the Community box, I presume, because the Notebook Discussions menu is used. I can’t be sure of this unless we come up with a way to track that menu. With these results, I know that these boxes are serving a purpose, so the next step is to test and tweak the laptop research and laptop shopping pages on the other side of those boxes. I know that there is a ton of room for improvement on both of these pages, so I look forward to doing a baseline test and then tweaking further. I wish Crazy Egg tracked user session lengths… that would be so perfect.

- It’s worth noting that a large chunk of visitors are already registered and immediately log in. So what does this mean? Do we need more fresh blood? (40% are returning visitors each day - that seems like a perfectly suitable percentage for a forum.) Or does this mean that we are simply losing a lot of people who never click? (And we need more data to come to that conclusion - Analytics would be a good tool as it shows session lengths.)

- The final main observation is that people want to see the notebook reviews. Of course, I knew this already, but the heatmap confirms the importance of this feature to our visitors. We recently rewrote the whole laptop review database to make it more useful and easier to add to, but we haven’t started really promoting it to get reviews. A competitor actually pays $50-$60 per review. That isn’t a playing field I want to be on, so I plan to get creative. Don’t get me wrong, members do submit reviews, but there is a lot of room for improvement (is that a theme here? :D). This is actually one thing I would love to tackle at the Elite Retreat next week. There is a marketing angle we are missing here. I would bet we aren’t vocal enough about the fact that we want reviews. I bet we could make it easier to submit them. I bet that we could create a top-notch review database that people really want to be a part of - we just haven’t really gone there yet. Stay tuned on this one. (But the pressure is on seeing this heatmap!)

One thing that I should mention is that there are two other views of these same results on the Crazy Egg Dashboard: a list view that shows actual click numbers, and an overlay view that shows pluses and minuses that expand and contract to show clicks and their percentages. I find the heatmap the easiest to interpret, but I do toggle back and forth for more specific information.

I feel like this post is a bit self-absorbed since it’s all about how to make my forum better, but anything said here applies to you all as well. We *all* could stand to make some improvements, so apply some of these ideas to your site. As you are making adjustments, keep in mind that small changes make big differences, so try not to change a bunch of things at a time. Change one or two things and then test for results. If you don’t get the desired reaction, try again. And remember: your changes could end up creating negative experiences for your users, so carefully watch what you do. If you are really ambitious, you can create two versions of your page and test both concurrently.

I am getting ready to go to the Elite Retreat on Sunday, and this tool will surely help me better prepare me for the conference. I have already identified areas that need critical attention, and this is just the beginning. If you start testing and tweaking with Crazy Egg, please just be very conscious of your users and their needs. Please don’t go nutty changing your whole site around. And when you get results, please share them with us!

Happy Testing and Tweaking!

UPDATE: CrazyEgg has generously offered all ForumTrends readers a free upgrade to 10,000 visits per month plus live reporting. As I said in my post, this is an ample amount of visits to test and tweak your site to make a real impact. To take them up on their offer, simply email info@crazyegg.com and tell them that you are a ForumTrends.com reader and you would like to use their free offer. This is a great deal - I hope it helps you improve your forum!

by Laua Alter, NoteBook Forums

For the past 6 years, I have set goals for my forum. Around this time each year I sit down and look over all the stats, analytics, etc. and come up with where I’d like to be a year from now. Here were my goals for 2006:

* 20,000 Members by Jan 1, 2007
* 32 New Members/day
* 2 New Tutorials a Week
* 5 New Code Snippets a Week
* 5 New Resources a Week
* 1,000,000 Page Views/mo
* 300,000 Unique Visitors/mo
* 400 Posts/day

Now, to look at where I am today:

* 19,000 Members (On track for 20k)
* 79 New Members/day
* 4 New Tutorials a Week
* 8 New Code Snippets a Week
* 1 New Resources a Week
* 550,000 Page Views/mo (The way I measured page views changed)
* 300,000 Unique Visitors/mo
* 250 Posts/day

Out of 8 goals, I was able to meet 6. The areas I still need to work on are member submitted content, posts per day, and page views. So what should my goals be for 2007? Here’s what I’m shooting for:

* 75,000 Members by Jan 1, 2008
* 150 New Members/day
* 8 New Tutorials a Week
* 12 New Code Snippets a Week
* 5 New Resources a Week
* 800,000 Page Views/mo
* 500,000 Unique Visitors/mo
* 400 Posts/day

Now to develop a plan to reach those goals, I’ll share my plan with you at a later date, but I’d like to see what your goals are for 2007.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Some of you may have noticed that as your forum grows, it becomes far more complicated to manage the delicate interpersonal relationships that form among members and even among groups of members - especially in relation to the forum management. The extent of the problems certainly relates to the type of people that are interested in your subject matter (I can’t imagine managing and ‘adult’ type site! Yikes!), but if it’s your site and it’s any kind of issue, then it’s a big deal to you.

We have a very active Off Topic section. It had been more active previously, but we didn’t properly manage the tight groups that formed there, and when things go out of hand, one group left entirely. We are better off now, but it illustrates how serious members take issues that develop in their relationship with the forum management. For a long time, there has been a sentiment that our Moderators have problems with ‘power tripping.’ Often, this comes about because not everyone is familiar with all the details of every situation, but that explanation doesn’t always diffuse problems in a forum setting. Generally, this is a simple problem of communication. In an effort to address these issues, we decided to try something that we hadn’t done before, but we had seen in a similar format on other sites.

We have created a new usergroup at NotebookForums.com - Trusted Members. As written by my Director:

TM’s will be responsible for communicating more directly with us staffers from what is really going on around the site from the member level. They are much more in tune with what is going on than many of us staffers will ever be given how much time we spend on the backend of operations and we hope to harness that influence to better communicate many of the initiatives we are working on going forward.

They will also be our first line of defense against many of the darker elements that can show themselves from time to time to do nothing but cause trouble.

TM’s cannot edit posts or ban anyone so there can never be the accusations of ‘Power Tripping’, yet they have a direct line to any of the mods and admins of the forum and will be listened to very closely as they unfold their assessment of the goings on around the site and what actions they feel are justified.

You can read more of the thread here as well as member reactions.

We nominated 5 core TMs from across the entire forum and tasked them with coming up with 5 more. We, the Admin and Moderators, are not interfering at all with this process. They have a private forum where they can discuss issues, complain, alert us to problems, etc. They all have our direct contact info in case of emergency. They can also move posts to other sections so they can help keep the board organized, but they have no other moderation abilities.

It’s been a few days since the program started and so far the response has been really great! Member responses have been a mix of, “It’s about time!” to “Great, we have Rent-a-Cops now…” So far, their private forum has been buzzing with posts about ideas for the site, the best way to nominate new TMs, and how best to define their role. They have been very enthusiastic and are eager to help improve the site.

One other nice thing is that this TM group is ripe for picking new Mods.

I know that not every forum is in a place where this type of usergroup is needed, but keep in mind that forums thrive on volunteer staff. Forums are generally crawling with people eager to help out in any way they can, but not everyone has the time it takes to be a moderator. We all need to take a step back at times to make sure we are making the most effective usage of our volunteer resources. It’s one of the great parts of being a forum Admin! How many static sites have visitors ready and willing to help on a daily basis?

But above all, make sure to thank and respect all of your staff. It’s so amazing to see so many people come together for one cause - a cause that you have spent countless hours creating. Without our members, we would be nothing.

I’ve been working on a few other projects lately and in the process needed to create dynamic landing pages based on what a user searched for. For those that don’t know a landing page is:

The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

I liked the idea of making a page look exactly like what the user searched for. If I searched for “rusty blue widgets” and the page I arrive at has “RUSTY BLUE WIDGETS” I think “Wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for!” and I’m much more likely to scroll down and read more. I decided to apply this same concept to my programming forum. I already have about 200,000 pages listed in google, and around 80% of my traffic is organic. So making every page a “landing page” seemed like a good idea.

I replaced my welcome message near the top of each page with the parsed out keywords from the search engine referrer. If a user searches for “C++ Sleep” and arrives at my site, they will see “C++ Sleep” in the welcome box and “Register for free and post your C++ Sleep Questions”. You can see an example of this by searching for C++ Sleep on google and clicking the first result.

Since implementing this change, I have seen an almost 80% increase in the number of registrations and my depth of session has increased by over 50%. I’ve also seen a slight bump in CTR and eCPM from AdSense.

I would highly suggest implementing some sort of landing page script if a lot of your traffic is organic. I adapted the code from here.

UPDATE: Michael from RC Nitro Talk put together a tutorial to create landing pages for your vBulletin forum. Thanks Michael!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com