XF 1.2 2 months after switching from vB - Traffic still down

Andre Daub

Andre Daub

Active member
I really like XF and i am happy that we did the move from vB 4.21 and vbSEO to XF.
Posts and Activity are up, Time on Site, Sites per Visit etc. is better than before.

But Visitors are down by nearly 50%!

We have had redirects in place. Some People told me, that it takes arround 6 months for full recovery in google. Can anyone confirm this?

Here you see our traffic. Red Line was the date we switched to XF.

traffic.webp

Maybe i am doing something wrong or have an error on my site?

I am happy for every Information and help and Motivation. ;-)

Would it help to install a sitemap?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Clickfinity said:
especially the section at the very bottom:
Click to expand...
Hm, i can´t see this entry?

For me it looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/login/
Disallow: /forum/admin.php
Disallow: /forum/find-new/
Disallow: /forum/account/
Disallow: /forum/posts/
Disallow: /forum/help/
Disallow: /forum/search/
Disallow: /forum/register/
Disallow: /forum/online/
Disallow: /forum/goto/
Disallow: /portal/
Disallow: /forum/lost-password/
Disallow: /favicon.ico

Sitemap: http://www.soccer-fans.de/forum/sitemap/sitemap.xml.gz

EDIT:

Ah- now i know what you mean. The Domain: domain.tld was just an example. ;-)

The Domain of the board is: http://www.soccer-fans.de/forum/
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
Yes google analytics, we used the build-in way in the admin.
Last week we changed it and put the code to page_container_js_head Template. But that makes no big difference.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'm thinking that your plugin from vBulletin was potentially double counting some traffic? I know we had a similar issue with some parts of our site/forum which gave everyone a fit that our traffic dropped until I finally located what had been inflating numbers.

A swap to Xenforo itself shouldn't create any drop in legitimate traffic (that wasn't from senseless page views and unnecessary refreshes to begin with) as long as you did proper redirects, as all old traffic can still get to new locations, and with proper robots.txt, as well as site indices, Google and other search engines will re-index your site rather quickly - we're talking days here, not months.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
XenForo by design has less pages to view, so it will show less page views. This is normal.

vBulletin had a page to confirm you made a post and a page to confirm you made an edit, for example (just to name a few). XenForo does this all on the same page.

This saves you both bandwidth, page loads, and overall resources. This is a good thing and now you'll get a true SEO reading and not one "fluffed up" by empty and wasteful pages.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Clickfinity said:
Okay, so that report in Google Analytics - is it Visitors or is it Page views?
Click to expand...
Visitors. Pageviews are only down 10 - 20% because the users read now 4 instead of 2 Pages, and the Time on Site went up too.
jwright said:
I'm thinking that your plugin from vBulletin was potentially double counting some traffic? I know we had a similar issue with some parts of our site/forum which gave everyone a fit that our traffic dropped until I finally located what had been inflating numbers.
Click to expand...
In Users online (15 minutes) , we have seen a big drop. So i learned, that vBulletin shows User who browse pics via google image search as online. They see only the picture, but they are not online.
Maybe the way how analytics counts is also different. We used the vbseo Plugin to put analytics on vB.
Adam Howard said:
XenForo by design has less pages to view, so it will show less page views. This is normal.
vBulletin had a page to confirm you made a post and a page to confirm you made an edit, for example (just to name a few). XenForo does this all on the same page.
Click to expand...
Yes, because of ajax etc. But like i said, page views is not a big drop like the visitors.

On the other side, there are missing some pages in the index. I think it should be arround 90.000 and it is only 40.500. Maybe the Sitemap does the job.

In google Webmastertools there is no Message that anything is wrong.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Drill down on your visitor count - is it across the board, or localised to region or country? Has the drop occurred in your primary target audience's country? What does XF Admin CP statistics say - has the number of posts, registrations or logons dropped comparatively since the conversions to XF? If your post count, new registrations count, and logons count is roughly the same as prior XF and after XF, then it would seem an Google issue and nothing with the site
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It is Search Engine Traffic in my country (google, yahoo and bing are down but google makes 95% of search in germany).
Statistic looks god, Activity of posts is up by 20%, Registrations are down from before (maybe because of the better spam filter).
In analytics the Stats are taking on, Users stay longer on the side, are making more pageviews.
Adsense Drop is like the drop in Pageviews around 20%.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom