Auto Post Titles

Hi All,

Would it be worth it to turn on the auto "RE" for title posts? I was reading some items on SEO and was reminded that Google gives more weight to the titles of posts when indexing them. We have some pretty good conversations sometimes and this may be one more step in getting them (and the forum) "found."

If you agree, I would also suggest that we work to make sure that titles for posts are representing what the post is about. Titles like "just a question" are not as helpful as "Question about Online Community SEO."

I could be crazy, but I think it will help!

Thanks,
RR

 

No its really any big SEO benefit at all. Keyword density is long dead and thats really the only purpose of repeating something over and over on a page.

 

Alot of sites i see with that 'Auto Re Post Title' Hack. Most of the sites im on, have it.
I think it improves SEO.

 

I have to completely disagree. Keyword density is not dead... it is one of the cornerstones of SEO. Search engines like Google use this as part of their algorthym in order to determine the relevance of a page.

If you have come accross anything that has helped you forum that opinion I would love to read it to get a better understanding.

Thanks!!
RR

 

Thanks for the suggestion, RockinRobbins.

I'm not quite sure that I understand the actual purpose of these "auto" thread titles. Would such an addition automatically create an appropriate thread title modeled after the content included within the actual post?

 

It is a standard feature in vBulletin.

No, it takes the title of the post you are replying to and add "Re: Post Title" in the title field.

 

Thanks for the clarification.

Folks, is this something that you'd like to see enabled? We can always take it for a test run before making any permanent changes.

 

When you get to the point where I am, opening a billion tabs at once, this would help. I don't know/care about the SEO effects, but I'd personally love to see it enabled.

 

How does one enable this? Might do it on my own forum

 

Yeah Wayne Luke :yes:

 

I always turn this off because I find it to be annoying to see Re: Auto Post Titles with every single post made in the thread. I don't think a post title should be used unless the user specifies one that is different than the post title.

 

I have never liked the re: thing... seems useless since it's pretty much made for threaded mode and not linear, don't see why you'd use it on a forum that uses linear mode.

 

It seems as though we have varying feedback in regards to this suggestion.

I wouldn't mind seeing this used here, although I can understand where the members against this idea are coming from. It could be a bit "distracting" to see such a title used in every post made within a thread. SEO-wise, I still cannot determine how this would assist the community - it's more of a referencing feature to me (if anything).

 

vBulletin Options -> vBulletin Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title

 

SEO & Use of vB Auto-Titles

Hi All,

I thought this addition would be helpful mostly from the SEO aspect since search engines like Google give more weight to titles when indexing their pages. Let's say for example that somebody was searching "First time forums" on Google. We have a great thread that addresses some key issues associated with this topic and I think it actually is called "First time forums" or something similar. By enabling the auto-title feature hypothetically Google should rank your site higher in its index because it sees that the thread is not only contains those keywords, but has indicated that they are important because they are part of the title tags in the post. (I say hypothetically because Google's exact search algorithm is proprietary so no one outside of Google knows exactly how it awards "points.")

I also mentioned the point about making sure that the titles of threads accurately depict the nature of the content because it makes searching the forums so much easier. Otherwise when your search returns come back you have to go in and out of the threads and review all the posts because you can't discount something by the title.

No matter to me either way, but just thought I would throw it out there. I will continue to try to update my titles were appropriate.

Thanks,
RR

 

They give more importance to content within heading tags (h1-h6) than it does to standard text. The post titles are simple standard text and will be no more relevant than other text on the page.

It is more about the structure of the document than where the text is.

 

This title is simple text? Bummer for SEO.

Thanks Wayne Luke. I guess I assumed that when vB asked for a title and bolded it that it was using the H1-H6 tags.

I did also read that SEO gives additional attention to text that is bolded, but obviously nothing like the heading tags.

Thanks!
RR

 

But its a reply to the post title isnt it?

 

Yes, but it wouldn't matter since it wouldn't be on a "header" tag [h1-h6] but only bolded [using tags].