Do Se's Rank The Topic Or The Whole Thread?, Question regarding serps from a forum Options

[xyZed]

I often don't include the quote if I'm replying directly underneath a post. It's just for tidyness really. I'm just wondering though if the quotes could contain valuable keywords that I'm thowing out.

Do search engines rank individual posts or do they rank the whole page or topic? Would the repeated words in the quote make any difference - even though the words are in the previous post anyway?

This post has been edited by xyZed: Jun 23 2007, 07:20 AM

[EGOL]

If your posts are listed on a single page (like the topics in this forum) then I don't think that the repetition will help you. Ranking benefit comes mainly from the original, non-duplicate content on a page.

Search engines rank pages not individual posts.

This post has been edited by EGOL: Jun 23 2007, 08:13 AM

[bragadocchio]

Search engines likely rank individual pages today, but the future may hold some different results. Something to think about for the future.

People from the search engines have been discussing indexing on a finer level of granularity, where different sections of a page may be index separately, based upon author or subject.

Google described this kind of indexing in a patent that talks about "AgentRank" which I described in some detail here:

http://searchengineland.com/070209-164512.php

Microsoft has also been looking at this closely, and have a number of papers involving "ObjectRank" ot Object level ranking. Here's one paper on the subject:

Object-level Vertical Search

At what point do things like Agentrank or Objectrank start being used? They may first start being used in the context of product searches for objectrank, and maybe blog posts for Agentrank. They may, or may not be a good match for a forum - but it's possible that both could be - forum posts are usually written by different authors, and are separated from other posts.

At this point, it probably shouldn't be a concern from a search engine indexing stance. But, it might be one from a readibility perspective. Long quotes from earlier posts mean that whatever is added in a new post may be much smaller than the older material.

[EGOL]

Thanks Bill, great info.

[xyZed]

Thanks for the replies. I thought it was an interesting point to raise. If SE's ever start to rank individual posts then the quoted material one is replying to could become relevant. It's perfectly feasible for a single post within a thread to be highly relevant for something someone is searching for, even if it's off topic. However, whether it will or not is unclear.

I personally don't like the way my forum displays quotes. It uses giant quotation marks and puts the text on a white background. The result is that the quotes stand out more than the actual reply (maybe it can be changed somewhere in the settings?). Also, I hate when people quote an entire post to add a reply when the post is directly underneath so my personal preference is to only quote relevant text if replying further down the thread.

As usual I do something for a while and then out of the blue it flashes into my mind that maybe there are potential consequences, which is why I started the thread.

[yannis]

I personally don't like the way my forum displays quotes. It uses giant quotation marks and puts the text on a white background. The result is that the quotes stand out more than the actual reply (maybe it can be changed somewhere in the settings?).

This can be changed by fiddling the theme CSS. What you can do view the page source of your forum, find out what classes are used for the 'quote' search for them in the style.css or whatever your file is called and replace the CSS with the colours you want. If the quotation marks are images you can replace the images.

A bit of topic but I though it may help.

Yannis

PS Highly unlikely search engines will read 'posts'. They are simply reading pages!