I’ve seen these question asked dozens of times on webmaster boards: “What’s the best way to drive traffic to new forums?  What’s the best way to get content on a new forum?”

The answers are typically, “make 10 posts a day under different names, ” or ,”buy a pay per post package from a company like ForumShock”.  I’ve done both before.  The first is tedious and the second costs money, so neither option is perfect.  However, I’ve got an idea for webmasters to quickly populate their new forum with lots of unique content for free.

We know that Google doesn’t index every page on the internet, right?  And we can also assume that if a site is somewhat outdate or if articles are very old and they haven’t been indexed yet, they’re not likely to all of a sudden get indexed.  So, Google can’t give you a duplicate content penalty if they don’t know you’re duplicating.   Great.

Visit other forums that operate in the same niche as you.  Try and find ones that are outdated and haven’t had posts in awhile.  Check to see how many pages they have indexed.  If it isn’t that many but there are some decent conversational posts, you’ve hit the jackpot.  Take it.

If you’re not a programmer, just sign on your board under an alias.  Copy/Paste the first thread of lots of posts.  Now make a new name, and copy/paste the second post from each of those same threads.  Nice… unique content (to google) that you didn’t even have to think about making.

If you could automate this process, set a tool to a homepage and have it scrape posts and repost them in your forum… you’d be pretty much golden.  I could use a tool like this and I might just have one developed when I have some spare cash to throw at it.

The only real problem with this is if the posts are time relevant, like “did you see the Ravens beat the Steelers 235245322 – 0? “  But, any relevant content is fine so the site isn’t a deserted island of zero posts.  And, you should probably scrape without any HTML code – because people often link to other threads in the forum, you might get their site deeper indexed and somehow screw yourself.  But then again, then maybe that would ensure that they get the duplicate content penalty and not you, even though they originated the content.  Hmmm.  Oh well I’m thinking too deep into this, you get the gist of what I’m saying.

Oh and if you make this tool, hook a brother up!