Forums used to have a bad review in terms of SEO and authority. In fact, forums were seen as the perfect place to spam with backlinks to site owners. It was everything except getting valuable resources or qualitative SEO. Since Google has penalized a bunch of these sites, SEO forums tend to be more white hat.
Actually, getting involved into forums can bring a lot of advantages to your company. Let’s see what SEO forums can offer, how to detect qualitative ones and a top of great SEO forums you should trust in 2015.
What are the advantages of being part of a forum?
Forums are an infinite source of information
Forums are a good place to get responses to your questions
Forums are a great way to promote your company and prove your knowledges to a qualitative audience
Forums can be a breeding ground of influencers to connect with
Forums can drive traffic to your website if you are offering your help. People will want to know who is behind this expertise
Forums can help you to collect feedbacks and insights
Forums are a good place for starting collaboration with people of your field
How to detect if a forum is trustworthy?
There are a lot of SEO forums existing and you might be tempted to look for forums not penalized by Google. But there are other factors you should focus on:
Do you have to create an account or pay to log in? If so, it can be a proof of quality since only highly interested people will take the time to create a profile
Do the forum have a moderator? If not, just go away
Is the content qualitative and relevant? That can be an obvious bullet but if the forum is not talking about SEO at the end, there is no point of staying there
What about the links? Are they allowed or not? If so, are they “nofollow” or “dofollow”? Be careful with the links politics of the forum. If too many links are published in “dofollow”, this is certainly a sign of poor quality forum
Does the forum have categories or subcategories? If not, the forum is just going to be a large source of noise with a poor navigation
What are the best SEO forums?
The Moz forum
Moz forum is a reference. It is really easy to search for topics through the right toolbar and the moz members always try to do their best to help you out. If you are looking for SEO answers, this is the right place.
SEOChat
This forum is great because it is both for beginners and experts. Thanks to clear categories, it is easy to navigate and you can even know how many persons have contributed.
DigitalPoint
The plus of this forum? The ability to see if the owners are online and to see their profiles. Of course, it also provides great resources and interesting topics.
Siteground
When registered, you will have access to web hosting topics but also SEO ones. This a very popular forum to know.
EWebDiscussion
This trustworthy forum is highly valuable because of its great navigation. It is organized by categories and subcategories and provides a lot of topics related to marketing and SEO.
Highrankings
This forum is also a good resource for SEO queries and it hosts some great members.
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