When Written: Feb 2009
Whilst doing a lot of development work recently, I had needed to search the web for help on one or two problems. I was amazed with how many different forums the same question came up on. I don’t mean the same topic of question; I mean EXACTLY the same question with the same answers! This is not a case of one user posting his / her question on various forums in the hope of getting an answer.
This is the situation of several Forums copying the data from each other. I would guess that this is in an attempt to improve their search engine rating and to drive traffic to them as well as making themselves look busier than they really are. But when the tenth one came up with exactly the same thread I could have screamed! The search engines at times are so fussy about the content on your web site that they will lower your page rank if they don’t like an advert you are hosting so why can’t they filter out these multiple identical forums. Could it be that each forum runs prodigious amounts of adverts supplied by the search engines?
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton