Long form articles on forum?

[goldmercury]

Guys long time no post.

I'm planning my next project and this includes long-form articles 2000+ words plus. The goal of the site is to build up a community and I'm wondering if I should maybe post the articles as forum posts. Anyone have any experience of this or advise why it might not be a good idea.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If your goal is to attract SEO traffic (it should always be a consideration), I would not post them on the forum. Google is not that interested in ranking forums that largely consist of user-generated content. They also tend to lack on-page SEO, unless your forum software lets you add H2's and H3's into the post, etc.

What I've seen some successful sites do, like MacRumors.com for instance, will link to their comments and have the comment count. When you click to add a comment, you get taken to the forum where a thread is created for every article they post. They have some custom work done where the most liked posts in the forum thread appear on the actual article's page.

 

[goldmercury]

Great advice thanks - I guess if I were leaking traffic this may not be such a bad tactic but this makes sense.

Also in regards to forums - i need to seed the content - does anyone know of a tool to rip facebook group posts? I know this content is not index and am thinking it may be a good place to start.

 

[secretagentdad]

I'm currently doing some long form forum plays in a couple of niches.

Modeling the behavior you want from your ops is very important.

Well trained brand loyal OPs are one of the highest value things you can gather in the internet attention economy.

I wouldn't even consider taking seo into account with what you're doing. Your goal is to get people to join your circle jerk club. Community plays are about seeding a spark to self perpetuation. Absolutely post long form high quality content on your forums. Its how you get one uppers and wonderkids to join. A couple of quality OP personality types can net you a network effect with a 1000 fold return.

People are imitators. Fill your forum with the kind of content your dream users will produce. The upside's there at the aggregate level.

On a related note.
https://flarum.org/
Its a bit non traditional in default organization but I think its a massive improvement over the more popular legacy software most people run on. Also FREE!