Forums are about to become valuable again for SEO

SEOGami

SEOGami

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Saw an interesting study today looking at around 35k ChatGPT citations by Kevin

Once you take the company's own site out of the equation, UGC was apparently the biggest third party source category, ahead of publishers and review sites.

Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.

Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.

The link itself might not even be the interesting part anymore. If ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and the other engines keep pulling opinions and brand information from communities, simply being discussed in the right places could have value.

Obviously the study is only SaaS and ChatGPT so I wouldn't draw massive conclusions from it yet.

Anyone actually testing this?

Not talking about spamming Reddit with fake recommendations. More whether you've seen forum/community mentions influence what ChatGPT or AI Overviews says about a brand.
 
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Yeah, I wanted to open a similar topic today

i see many parasites related to forums.
 
SEOGami said:
Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.
Click to expand...
I've actually seen the effects of Reddit but yet to try and see that of LinkedIn. Wikipedia is difficult since you can't create as much links or even conversations as in the other two.
SEOGami said:
Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.
Click to expand...
Forum links are still not great links, from this study you can see it's not the link that is being valued but rather the opinions of users on the forums. In essence, all that matters is a mention of the brand not even a link. I've also seen this, chatGPT cited a reddit page for my site. On that Reddit page, the user only mentioned my site and not linked to it.
 
javadth said:
Yeah, I wanted to open a similar topic today

i see many parasites related to forums.
Click to expand...
Can you give an example?
I saw fitness.com being used as a parasite. Then I tried to create an account and I never received an email to verify my account and be able to post.
Same happened with other forums, they are ranking and being abused, but they are apparently not opened for everyone
 
SEOGami said:
Saw an interesting study today looking at around 35k ChatGPT citations by Kevin

Once you take the company's own site out of the equation, UGC was apparently the biggest third party source category, ahead of publishers and review sites.

Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.

Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.

The link itself might not even be the interesting part anymore. If ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and the other engines keep pulling opinions and brand information from communities, simply being discussed in the right places could have value.

Obviously the study is only SaaS and ChatGPT so I wouldn't draw massive conclusions from it yet.

Anyone actually testing this?

Not talking about spamming Reddit with fake recommendations. More whether you've seen forum/community mentions influence what ChatGPT or AI Overviews says about a brand.
Click to expand...

Yes, we are testing.

I’m actually testing this right now with forum/community marketing, and so far it’s working very well.

From what I’m seeing, these mentions do seem to have an impact on how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

-> Long articles on medium
-> Long + short youtube videos
-> LinkedIn post
-> main site,

working and working very well

well, these days forum links are very effecting, high DA + traffic.

Thanks :)
 
Deadite said:
Can you give an example?
I saw fitness.com being used as a parasite. Then I tried to create an account and I never received an email to verify my account and be able to post.
Same happened with other forums, they are ranking and being abused, but they are apparently not opened for everyone
Click to expand...

check my posts
 
HenryObi said:
Forum links are still not great links, from this study you can see it's not the link that is being valued but rather the opinions of users on the forums. In essence, all that matters is a mention of the brand not even a link. I've also seen this, chatGPT cited a reddit page for my site. On that Reddit page, the user only mentioned my site and not linked to it.
Click to expand...

This is the exact behaviour we've noticed. So we've been working on a strategy that included owning the SERPs for brand keywords + using forums and other UGC elements as mention portals that capture the niche.

So far the results have been promising.
 
luckyman said:
Yes, we are testing.

I’m actually testing this right now with forum/community marketing, and so far it’s working very well.

From what I’m seeing, these mentions do seem to have an impact on how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

-> Long articles on medium
-> Long + short youtube videos
-> LinkedIn post
-> main site,

working and working very well

well, these days forum links are very effecting, high DA + traffic.

Thanks :)
Click to expand...
It's a LinkedIn post, not a LinkedIn article, right?:confused:
 
Forums could matter again, but probably more for genuine brand mentions than backlinks. The key will be real discussions, not obvious SEO seeding.
 
I think this is an interesting direction Community discussions can provide useful context and real world opinions that AI systems may reference but focus on genuine participation and relevance rather than trying to manufacture mentions.
 
i think community mentions are becoming more interesting for exactly that reason i haven't seen enough consistent data to say they directly improve rankings but genuine discussions on relevant forums can definitely build visibility and may influence how AI systems understand a brand
 
for some times but soon we will have AI SEO forums and then these AI bots give lower weight to forum posts
 
Yes we have been testing this as well, and so far our forum and community marketing has been quite effective.from what I have observed having mentions on various platforms helps increase visibility for the brand in AI generated answers.we have been trying out a combination of medium articles YouTube videos LinkedIn and content on our website.Forum mentions are also helpful as long as there is real traffic on the platform.
 
So they've nuked reddit and moved on to forums for UGC.
 
yeah its more important for seo.ai systems care more about what people are saying across different communities and not just the links. it interesting to see some real tests showing if these mentions actually change brand answers over time
 
Hi

I tried to register for a fitness.com forum account using it as a way to gain unauthorized access to information.

However, I never received an account verification email despite requesting resend, and haven't been able to post any messages, regardless of which email address I used.

Are there any tips on how to register and start posting on their forum?

Thanks
 
AI is hungry for information. Media is putting paywalls, reddit is producing trash & biased information, Google is filled with authority websites that look similar, and search engines killed UGC as much as possible making internet appear like a textbook. All the activity eventually shifted to social media which is controlled by their own bosses who are developing independent AI models. Now, the demand for UGC is increasing, so they might rank forums to encourage more people to participate in discussions so that they can happily scrape and reproduce content.
 
yeah i noticed reddit mentions showing up more in ai answers lately real discussions seem to carry more weight than before
 
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