A site I help with sells a particular set of items, they have a strong reputation locally, and sell parts nationally online. From an observational point of view I enjoy working with them as they do everything right - always willing to go the extra mile for customers, even at times when it seems counter productive (for example spending large amounts of time helping a customer who has spent relatively little money) I would definitely put them in the "good guys" bracket.
Checking server logs I notice they get quite a few links from phpbb style forums, talking about how great the service was/how good the prices were etc. These forums appear to be quite popular - large user list, lots of discussion and questions per day etc.
But (and here is the problem) I'm almost certain these discussion groups aren't being picked up by google.
The customers just don't seem to be the kind of customer who have a blog/twitter feed/website - the sort of content which is more likely to be picked up by google and have page ranking.
I understand partly this is why the stackoverflow/exchange sites exist - to make the web a better place, make answers easier to find, more search engine friendly etc.
Does anyone have any advice as to how to deal with this "problem" of old style discussion groups?