Question: For those affiliates with forums, how do you handle this situation in regards to SEO?
What if you have some good threads that you turn in to articles on your main site, how do you make sure that you do not create duplicate content for your site? Which page do you try to optimize better?
For the general topic of forums and duplicate content: with a lot of care and attention. It's one of the more troublesome issues of having a forum for sure.
As per your specific question - option A) 301 the thread to the article page, or option B) Put up the article and "remove" the thread, so it 404s.
Option A is far better, assuming it's been indexed by the search engines.
My thought is, the forum will have the "content" and a bunch of other variables like other people posting their comments and other posts. If an affiliate wanted to pull just the main content and make it a page on their site, without all the other comments and posts, wouldn't that be good enough to differentiate and avoid duplicate content penalties?
If there are substantial replies to the initial post then yes, and the assumption that the article will be posted on the main site - whereas the thread would be buried within the forums, would probably lead to Google primarily selecting the article page over the forum thread due to the internal link structure.
Affiliates with forums and duplicate content
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