Changes at YachtForums...

They still represent inbound links, but it's crossed my mind to remove less relevant discussions from years ago. The part that absolutely KILLS me is Google is ranking some yachting websites better than YF for the wrong reasons. For example...

AIM bought a certain superyacht domain that really doesn't have good content. YF always outranked it in a search for builders. Because AIM's holding include Show Management and a suite of marine magazines and websites, this gave weight to the new domain. Still, this domain can't hold a candle to YOUR discussions or the reviews we've written.

Another website has published features that are nothing more than the same verbiage with different specifications. They get pics from the yard, post it up with generic garble and people come just to see the pics. It's a good place for designers and decorators to study trends, or magazine editors to get the latest news, but I don't know any people in those professions that can afford a yacht.

Google needs to re-evaluate their definition "rich content", because these sites have very thin content. The whole thing has become a popularity contest.

That may be part of the problem, but I've been studying videos from Google's SEO expert Matt Cutts and duplicate forum content doesn't carry as harsh a penalty as thin or copied content. Sadly, there's a broker website topping lots of keywords by re-publishing reviews written by magazines. It is NOT their content and Google should be de-ranking that site. They re-published several of our reviews until I caught them and threatened legal action.

To update this thread...

As of this morning, we've finished canonical redirects to over 2200 news pieces. This has taken about 6 weeks, including weekends. It's been tedious and time consuming, but it's paying off. Google crawled YF early last week and the number of duplicates title tags and meta descriptions were reduced by 70%. On the next crawl - sometime in the upcoming week - we should see most of the duplicates disappear. It will take some time, but our rankings on target keywords should bump up

You may also note about a dozen new builder forums have been added for better indexing of news, discussions, etc. They are also included in the new display pages located in the builders list on the front page of YF. We created these pages for readers to have easy access to the latest news, reviews and features on the builder they are researching or following. Clicking on any of the display articles takes the reader directly into that particular builder's forum for expanded information.

This morning I set up a general discussion forum for Lobster/Picnic/Downeast Day boats, including sub-forums for Hinckley, Vicem and Midnight Lace I moved a couple dozen discussions and news pieces into these forums. If someone wants to add a specific builder to this category, let me know...

http://www.yachtforums.com/superyacht/lobster-picnic-downeast-day-boats.349/

Hi Brian,

Thread titles in each post are redundant. If you look at the latest versions of vBulletin, they have been removed. Both of the sites you mentioned are using OLD versions of vBulletin; 3.8 and lower, mostly because of the vulnerabilities with the later releases of the software. These vulnerabilities are the reason we switched to XenForo and while it's been a difficult transition from the back end, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. With regards to thread titles in each individual post, it can only harm SE ranking because its very probable that bots will interpret these titles as duplicates which carries a certain penalty due the latest release of Google's search engine algorithm.