Are Forums Still Good for Search Engine Traffic?

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I’m not talking about just posting in a forum, I am talking about having your own forum!

I have always found that forums are a great way to bring in traffic to your website because it doesn’t take much to get them active and it is easy for others just to just post about something small and get others replying.

Alot more pages are generated in a website and therefore have higher chance of more pages being indexed in the search engines.

I know that it is easy to get a forum popular as you can almost start off with just a few friends posting to each other and then all of a sudden it become one huge website with loads and loads of posts and information.

The other benefit of having a forum is its self generating traffic and clicks and when you are a a member you will generally have other members being able to message you, so then you will naturally go back to the site to check your messages. This type of traffic is much more sustainable then traffic being generated from say a Blog.

I have installed and used many free forums such as PHPBB, SMF (Simplemachines), MyBB and others, but like I say they are really ok to use for a short while but long term, they are not good for bringing in traffic and customizing.

After years of trying out other forums myself I have found that nothing compares with vBulletin.

vBulletin is always up to date with the new functionality that users want to see, including mods that are asked from community members are usually added without wait time on other sites, so the overall quality and staff behind it are more serious.

Another thing is that vBulletin have the SEO friendly URL option which most other forums sites also do have but seem to be very buggy. You can also set up auction style forums and other add-ons such as classifieds which no other forum can.

Actually I found this to be the case with many open source programs, that you pay for what you get!

Do you have your own forum? Are you a member in a forum? What are your thoughts about the traffic it generates?