Wil Reynolds Wil Reynolds

October 9, 2008

Delivering content with popular platforms good for Google & good for you!

Today I did a search and saw this:

serps

A Google search that is bringing in forum information – from vbulletin!

Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don’t know.

By using a highly popular platform for your content delivery, you’ll likely:
1 – Cut costs & open yourself up to a larger developer pool in the case you need development help
2 – Make it easier for Google to parse your data

I’m going to get into more detail about point #2
Google knows that it can hit the a large portion of the market maybe 40-80 percent of content delivered on blogs/forums (I’m pulling this out of my you know what) if it can EASILY parse the vbulletin / phpbb for your forum
or
wordpress / typepad for your blog.

That is exactly what you are seeing above, now lets think about how Google might use this parsed data…freshness maybe!?

If they can slice up # of authors, last post, number of replies, comments, etc in your posts (whether on or a forum or blog) it will give just one more indicator on how fresh a forum or blog is and could be used someday to impact rankings -stale forum that gets few unique posts, very infrequently could equal = poor forum which could = poor rankings.

Being fresh off of my SMX East kick - now its time to think…how can this data be scraped, and if so, what would it tell us? Maybe you only advertise or sponsor forums that have high “freshness”? Again I am thinking out loud here, how else could this information be used?

The folks over at blogoscoped are talking about it too.

2 COMMENTS

  • Why Having Your Site Built From Scratch is Probably a Dumb Idea says:
    October 13, 2008 @ 1:52 pm

    [...] I saw this post recently over on the SEO blog at Seer Interactive.  I had the good fortune of meeting Wil Reynolds at a recent industry event and continue to check out the tips and info that he posts on his blog and elsewhere.  Wil makes a couple of really good points in this posts where he says: Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don’t know. [...]

  • Jon Payne says:
    October 16, 2008 @ 5:55 pm

    I agree on both ends here Wil… except that I can think of instance or two where building your own system might make sense, but generally a popular platform is probably the way to go.

    My firm recently developed our own platform in-house simply b/c there was a critical feature that we needed that was not available in any existing app that we reviewed. Total development cost was somewhere just under $10k and its done in PHP and MySQL so I think we’ll be okay as far as your issue #1 above. For issue #2, it produces regular webpages and does not currently push content via XML so we’re probably missing out on something there… not having our content “pushed” to Google. Integrating XML feeds will be a main focus of version 2.0. That said, I’ve also started to look at the wealth of plugins and ways to customize Wordpress for this and future needs. The options are many.

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