AlternateRoute, 2 years ago

Not really… Nearly every phpBB, SMF, Invision forum etc is a separate self hosted community and they get indexed. Hell even small ones like one of my gaming guilds ranked high for specific key words.

For SEO to work well you need clear links to clear topics, and it helps to have automatic metada also to assist indexing.

Having google compatible site maps assists in crawling the site.