Forum Administration

Search engines are more often relying on Topic title. A vigilant Moderators need to convert the generalized topic titles with the content specific topic titles to get good search engine ranking and also for better searching at forums by members.

The members tend to give vague topic title to the thread they are starting. For example ‘Hi!!!’, ‘Help needed’, ‘Information needed’, ‘Urgent information required’ e.t.c Though these topics may contain very important discussion topic of your website, it gets omitted by search engines and also from those who later try to search your forum by topic title. Apart from that, topic titles like these does not look good in the forum.

The Forum administrator should give clear instructions to Moderators, and Senior Members to enforce and use good topic title for new threads. Moderators should be specifically told to rename the topic title as soon as they find one to deviate from the content. Though this can be practiced easily, it has some downsides:

1. If the Member who originated the topic is not told about changing of the title, he may forget and fail to follow up his thread.
2. Member may consider it rude that his topic title has been moderated.
3. Renaming the old topics may reduce the ranking for those topics in the search engines.
4. The job of moderators increases many fold.

Thus a delicate balance need to be maintained and if ritually followed, once the forum gets populated, it takes no time for new member to feel comfortable, and search engine to crawl.

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