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Many people say forums can't do well with SEO.

This is because most of the content is user-generated. You can't force your members to create content in a manner that's SEO-friendly, right?

So, a lot of the SEO tactics just don't work out as they do on a blog where you control the majority of the content.

So, with that said, why not make your forum a type where you have to register and log in to view the content?

Would this work? Would this not work? Tell us your thoughts, and especially any experience with it!

They are good, but it obviously depends on the forum itself. The more well-known the forum, the better the quality of traffic it has, and the greater the quantity of traffic, the better it will be to use it for SEO.

The only problem with this is that getting bots to crawl content locked behind a login is a pain, if not impossible, for smaller sites that will get zero support to achieve this. Therefore, all that content will be removed from searches, which is not ideal for SEO. I have seen solutions where the topic is public, and the replies are registration-only, and this seems to work.

However, I base a lot on what I do as a user. Most sites that I find and get greeted by a "register a free account to view this" means I bounce immediately and go to the next search result. I also have been forced to register an account to see a reply that I needed, and I have never stuck around due to the action. So, while this is merely MY use case, it does affect how I run my sites, and therefore I avoid it.