Hello,

I was wondering what your thoughts were on the content value of message forums. Does google or the other search engines recognize the content and posts within a forum as unique content for a site?

Any thoughts are much appreciated!

As you do Google searches, alot of the answers will come from forums. For example, if you look up something about removing a virus, you won't just get anti-virus companies, you get alot of sites/forums telling how to remove or fix it.

I don't know that the content is considered unique, but it would seem that way from the search results. There must be some good value to the content, since some of the forums are quite huge and make a "nice" monthly income (which don't ask because that is usually confidential).

Dave

Of course. If you built your own spider / bot from the ground up, how would you distinguish between a forum, blog, static web site, and any other type? It's all just html you get from requesting URLs.

And like DaveMo said, it's a good thing. I work in IT, and when I search for how to fix some obscure problem, I get plenty of forums, which are usually more useful than the actual documentation.