User-Generated Content (USG)- The way to build BIG sites

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LuckyGamble

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I was thinking about the biggest sites on the internet, and found that really, the biggest sites are just aggregated content from users AKA User-generated content, and yet, google "lowers" that kind of content in regards to SEO.

Like, one would prefer a link in an article in a newspaper site, and would decline a link form a forum LOL.

I don't know guys, it just seems that google is just playing dumb.

Heck! Google and Youtube are just user-generated content! (USG)

It would be incredibly ALMOST impossible for someone, to create content similar to that found in google, youtube, reddit, etc, etc.

So, is user-generated content bad? Haha! Not at all!

Understand that there's more than just writing articles and hope that google notices them and ranks them some day :D
 
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I had a moderately popular forum website from 2012-2021. About 15k uniques a day depending on the year. It was all UGC since it was all forum threads. I lost nearly all my traffic by the end of 2021. Year after year I watched as the forum threads declined in search for all the keywords I targeted. Until nothing but very easy keywords ranked where you might expect forum thread discussions or reddit to be. Nothing changed on the forum and I still got natural links from blogs etc monthly. But I still was eventually removed from the first page for the majority of things over time.

I dont think id waste my time with UGC anymore unless the best content was taken from then deleted on the UGC area and optimized on a blog.
 
User generated content and Web 2.0 are nearly synonymous. The main issue is actually getting the users
 
Zombie Pop said:
I had a moderately popular forum website from 2012-2021. About 15k uniques a day depending on the year. It was all UGC since it was all forum threads. I lost nearly all my traffic by the end of 2021. Year after year I watched as the forum threads declined in search for all the keywords I targeted. Until nothing but very easy keywords ranked where you might expect forum thread discussions or reddit to be. Nothing changed on the forum and I still got natural links from blogs etc monthly. But I still was eventually removed from the first page for the majority of things over time.

I dont think id waste my time with UGC anymore unless the best content was taken from then deleted on the UGC area and optimized on a blog.
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Google wants no competition man!
TheOverlord said:
User generated content and Web 2.0 are nearly synonymous. The main issue is actually getting the users
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Yup!
 
Are we back to 2010s? User generated content is utterly sh*t nowadays
An AI generated content can perform 100x better, and can generate 1000x faster content.
Unless you teach your users to write the exact content you need to rank for free.
Also the work you require to get to that point is doable but extremely hard.
Not worthy anymore from my POV
In all my sites nowadays I have comments closed. No more UGC for me
 
There are case study that by removing UGC( long-ass real user comments) from a post, the ranking goes straight up.

If you want to keep UGC as a way to enrich your content it's fine, to move ranking it's nearly useless.
 
SirLouen said:
Are we back to 2010s? User generated content is utterly sh*t nowadays
An AI generated content can perform 100x better, and can generate 1000x faster content.
Unless you teach your users to write the exact content you need to rank for free.
Also the work you require to get to that point is doable but extremely hard.
Not worthy anymore from my POV
In all my sites nowadays I have comments closed. No more UGC for me
Click to expand...

4440 said:
There are case study that by removing UGC( long-ass real user comments) from a post, the ranking goes straight up.

If you want to keep UGC as a way to enrich your content it's fine, to move ranking it's nearly useless.
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That only means that this forum is going to die?!

I mean, blackhatworld is 100% use-generated content. Come one, don't tell me this forum will due to that...

2QEqi31
 
It's important to difference the fact that UGC plain works to the fact that it's not a great deal.

I mean, I could write up an awesome article in the forum about something relatively unknowingly well queried and rank, still it won't be optimized in any sense (other than the domain reputation itself).

But if someone's write the similar article in SE, a different thing will be

Still if someone wrote it + 10K more SEO related topics with IA, most of them will be 10 times better than those just 1 sentence questions threads we commonly see in this forum

So technically, the reality is that obvioulsy Manually written content is above all but IA content is above UGC. And in the future probably people will make some tweaks to make IA content generation even better than manually written content from a ranking perspective (if someone have not done this already).

So the thing here is that UGC is not as big as it used to be back to 2010s (still some marketing bloggers talk about it like if it was a panacea
 
Dont ever expect UGC to rank for much. YMYL queries it will never rank for. UGC is not typically looked at as "expert" or "authority" content. It gets discounted by the algorithm because of that fact.
 
Zombie Pop said:
Dont ever expect UGC to rank for much. YMYL queries it will never rank for. UGC is not typically looked at as "expert" or "authority" content. It gets discounted by the algorithm because of that fact.
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Yeah, but you as a user, can find a ton of info in forums.
 
LuckyGamble said:
Yeah, but you as a user, can find a ton of info in forums.
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Depends on the forum I guess. many forum websites are not useful at all. Forums are not the first place I go to learn something. Ever.
 
Zombie Pop said:
Depends on the forum I guess. many forum websites are not useful at all. Forums are not the first place I go to learn something. Ever.
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Yeah, but there are def forums that are worth their weight in gold when it comes to info.

Anyway, my point is that google demotes user-generated content eventhough google itself is a user content aggregator.
 
UGC doesn't mean that a user generated it. It means that it has a UGC tag. Forums can decide to make links posted from users from users do-follow. Blogs can make guest post links seem like UGC to google as well.
 
The classification also has to do with the platform/software. Forum threads, comments etc. are regarded as UGC even without UGC tag.
 
Zombie Pop said:
The classification also has to do with the platform/software. Forum threads, comments etc. are regarded as UGC even without UGC tag.
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Pretty sure mybb is configured to give forum posts UGC tags which can be changed very easily.
 
ReaL_GainZ said:
Pretty sure mybb is configured to give forum posts UGC tags which can be changed very easily.
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I never used mybb, I used IPB, and Xenforo. Google knows it is forum software or forum threads, just like GSA SER knows thats mybb and not IPB or Wordpress. mybb will always host UGC because thats what it was made to do. That's the point I'm making. Forum threads and blog comments are UGC, no matter if you use the <cite> html element (if that could even be done correctly..?) when you develop the blog comment section. Google is smart enough to know that and does.
 
All big UGC sites started with a lot of funding. If you start a forum or a platform alone without much budget, it'll not reach anywhere. You need influencers or ads to drive a lot of traffic until daily active users stick to the platform and keep generating revenue.
 
Quora and Reddit aint stronger that they have used to be. :/

Nowdays you need keyword <reddit> for the source to pop up.

Event though the answer that I get from reddit is much better, straight foward than regular site with 1000x of pointless words.
 
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/health.1404442/
This is what I mean. According to @Scorpion Ghost he was saved by a forum; a user-generated content website.

Yeah a lot of them are not good, but there are really good user-generated content websites/forums and unfortunately, google an big tech are fighting against them :(
 
LuckyGamble said:
I was thinking about the biggest sites on the internet, and found that really, the biggest sites are just aggregated content from users AKA User-generated content, and yet, google "lowers" that kind of content in regards to SEO.

Like, one would prefer a link in an article in a newspaper site, and would decline a link form a forum LOL.

I don't know guys, it just seems that google is just playing dumb.

Heck! Google and Youtube are just user-generated content! (USG)

It would be incredibly ALMOST impossible for someone, to create content similar to that found in google, youtube, reddit, etc, etc.

So, is user-generated content bad? Haha! Not at all!

Understand that there's more than just writing articles and hope that google notices them and ranks them some day :D
Click to expand...

BHW is UGC also. :D
 
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