The idea behind this trend is that better page rankings make a community easier to find. Although there is a truth to the idea that making your forum rank higher in searches will get you more sign-ups, there are some problems with this line of reasoning.

First of all Google PageRank isn't really relevant for a forum. A high page rank may help somewhat with SEO, but it will never help to keep the community itself active. In other words, what good is a high search engine ranking and a flood of new visitors if there is no activity in the community to support your member base, and nothing to attract new signups?

In this article we will take a closer look at Google's page ranking system, and at how it fails when it comes to forums.

Before we discuss page rankings for forums, let's cover the PageRank system itself.

Google created page rankings as an easy way to represent the popularity of a website. The idea behind page rank is that the more links that a website has pointing to it, the more popular the site must be.

To gauge a site's popularity Google will count the number of one-way links to that site, analyze the popularity of the site that provides a link, and also analyze the relevancy of each link. With this data, Google's system calculates a page rank. In other words PageRank is a single number that represents the popularity of a web site.

Although this system works for a regular website (assuming people aren't cheating the system by buying relevant links), it doesn't work well for a forum.

For a bulletin board, the page rank numbers are somewhat irrelevant. They do count to a certain degree on the front page of the forum. But the threads themselves (the important content on the site) are rarely rated properly.

In fact, by the time a single page of a forum has a good page rank; it is usually considered an old post. The thread may have held the most useful information on the web, and it may get hundreds of replies; but, since no one is linking to it, the page rank is still quite low.

The same idea holds true for the forums in their entirety. An old forum, which no longer houses an active community, will often have a much higher page rank than the newer active community. The reason for this is quite simple. Many people have happened across old threads and linked to them to provide information to others. This hasn't happened with the newer site yet.

What it takes to rank a forum, is a look at aspects that matter to community.

If you wanted a gauge to the health of an online community you would have to account for many factors. Member count, the activity of those members, thread count, posting activity, and more would be have to be taken into account to gain a picture of where the forum really ranks when compared to another (the factors that BoardsMD - http://www.boardsmd.com - looks at).

Over time, as more people begin to link to the information on the forum, the page rank will grow automatically. A forum administrator shouldn't waste their time working on improving page rankings. The focus should always be on the community itself, and on the members. With a healthy active community, page ranks will take care of themselves, and your site will be more valuable to members since your focus is always on forum health.