The forum on your website can be a great source of user generated content, and it can help people easily get answers to their questions. However, with just a few modifications, you can make your forum a big source of free search engine traffic.
Since forums tend to include detailed questions and answers, and will include topics that you would never have thought to include as regular content on your website or blog, the forum can be a goldmine for picking up long tail search phrases phrases that only get searched a few times a month. Normally, it wouldnt make sense for you to try to optimize for these phrases for a few extra visitors, but if the people visiting your site are going to do this for you, then it makes complete sense to take advantage of this content.
The problem is that most forums are difficult for the search engines to crawl. The urls to your topics will frequently include a ? which is a red flag for a search engine spider. This means that the topic can be dynamically generated and that it could get stuck in an infinite loop. The other problem is sessions ids. This is the id assigned to any visitor when theyre browsing your forum. If the...