Ok I did some experiments on Google and found something interesting. When I copied and pasted whole paragraphs from the Rooshv forum into Google, it usually brought up the Rooshv thread in the top of search results. So I guess their forum isn't as penalized or devalued as ours is. For example, if you copy and paste this paragraph from a Rooshv thread into Google:
After twelve years on Mybb, the time has come to change forum software to Xenforo, which has more features and is better maintained by its developers. I will be making this change on Monday, May 4 starting around 11am EST. The forum will be offline until the job is complete, about 3-8 hours. All forum posts, private messages, and attachments will be transferred over.
You will see the thread it came from at the top of Google search results, which is this:
https://www.rooshvforum.com/threads/for ... 020.37339/
When I tested the same thing with this forum, the results weren't as good. A few of the threads could be found by copying/pasting paragraphs from them, but most threads didn't show up unless I put "happierabroad" into it as well. That's very sad and bad. Shame on Google.
However, the good news is that when I tested this with our blog articles at:
https://blog.happierabroad.com the results were better. Google was able to find many of the blog articles when I copied and pasted paragraphs from it. Perhaps the blog ranks better because it uses permalinks, like Rooshv forum does? That seems to be the deciding factor that makes the difference.
The good news here is that this means that if the permalinks are the deciding factor, and allow us to be ranked good still, then this site may not be as devalued as I thought. I don't know. I will have to run more tests and see. Or change this forum into mybb or xenforo and have every thread turn into permalinks to see if that would make the difference.
Another thing I noticed is that Google isn't indexing every post, not even in the Rooshv forum. It seems to be indexing the first page of the thread only, and usually the top half or top portion of each thread. Not every post or page in the thread. I heard that long ago, that Google tends to index the top portion of each page, not all of it. Is that true? Or only true for forums? I tested this theory with some popular blogs and Google was able to find the bottom text of the blogs ok. So maybe this only applies to forums?