Decline of Forums/UGC in Google

One of the big SEO issues with forums are paginated threads in general. Google is only going to rank the first page in the thread well. I've just about never seen a non page 1 ever show up high in search results. Does anyone know if Google crawls all pages of a thread and evaluates it's entirety and then ranks if the first page accordingly? I doubt it. That means if your first page of every thread is not awesome, you're stuck. If you have amazing content scattered around 30 pages of a thread, sorry, you're out of luck. That is the key to up/down voting. It sucks for discussion, but it forces all the best content to the first page and high up the page. If anyone has a solution to this you'll be very rich. As of now there is no good solution to marry threaded discussion with up/down voting or any other quality content raising methods.
 
Clicks in search increasing again (doubled), In january there is a normal increase for our forum (everybody wants to lose the extra pounds :p), but not as big as this and i also got a confirmation mail from google today for the mobile-first index switch.
 
Canonical Tags - we've had this since XF 1.x.

The problem for me is that we have no control over them (forgive me if I'm wrong about that).

So for example if I have two sides and there are identical content in a resource , I want to be able to manage the canonical tag from site B so that it makes site A the canonical. This is easy in Wordpress using the Yoast plugin.

For me the SEO in Xenforo is more about taking control. We are often at the mercy of whatever content members post so I believe everything we can do to take control is useful, e.g. custom titles and meta descriptions.
 
It would be nice if site speed can be improved:

192721
 
Two things.

1) That's the mobile result which (IMO) unrealistically throttles the connection. I do not disagree that it is possible to have a slow mobile connection, and in fact in some regions that is "the norm" but typically a 4G connection would perform much better than this result would suggest.

Much more realistic score (Desktop):

192725


2) The URL you used according to the link in your post is xenforo.com/community. Google in that case is assuming you mean http://xenforo.com/community but the actual canonical version of our URL is actually https://xenforo.com/community/ (note https and trailing slash) so Google is taking into account two redirects that need to happen.

Correct mobile score:

192723
 
It would be nice if site speed can be improved:

View attachment 192721
If that's mobile and not desktop it's ok in my opinion. But if that's desktop, you need to reevaluate your hosting situation cause I'm getting 99/100 site wide using basic mod_pagespeed rules with PHP FPM on nginx (basically all achieved with @eva2000 CMM). There's not much hope for mobile until I implement AMP, I believe, for serving smaller images. I don't even know if that'll work. But I'm still high 60s low 70s mobile.
 
Yes, mobile first is Google's focus. My audience has been 80% mobile for many years. Mobile is the most important metric IMHO.

When you start optimizing for mobile, there are many issues that you encounter with XF. Try to implement Google PageSpeed or CloudFlare cache. Images and JS become an issue.
 
Two things.

1) That's the mobile result which (IMO) unrealistically throttles the connection. I do not disagree that it is possible to have a slow mobile connection, and in fact in some regions that is "the norm" but typically a 4G connection would perform much better than this result would suggest.

Much more realistic score (Desktop):

View attachment 192725

2) The URL you used according to the link in your post is xenforo.com/community. Google in that case is assuming you mean http://xenforo.com/community but the actual canonical version of our URL is actually https://xenforo.com/community/ (note https and trailing slash) so Google is taking into account two redirects that need to happen.

I got a 68 using desktop Chrome just 2 minutes ago using the first, and 78 using the second link... Might just be something random...
 
Hello everyone

I am looking for help. I need to hire someone to help me regain some of my strangely lost organic traffic. Used to use vbulletin 4.2 until late May 2018 and switched to Xenforo 2 (for forum, homepage is WordPress). My site is www.ExcelMale.com and I am attaching graphs. Is there anyone out there that I can hire to look into what the problems are? Thank you.
Nelson
 

Attachments

  • organic traffic dying on ExcelMale.webp
    organic traffic dying on ExcelMale.webp
    57 KB · Views: 74
I am looking for help. I need to hire someone to help me regain some of my strangely lost organic traffic.
Maria Haynes is the best, but she costs like $4k. Your graph is nasty, that is a terrible loss. The only major reported Google update around that big drop was Medic which dropped around Aug 1st 2018. That update definitely targets your website topic. Research that update and see what applies to you and what you can do about it.
 
Maria Haynes is the best, but she costs like $4k. Your graph is nasty, that is a terrible loss. The only major reported Google update around that big drop was Medic which dropped around Aug 1st 2018. That update definitely targets your website topic. Research that update and see what applies to you and what you can do about it.
Thanks dethfire. I appreciate your taking the time to answer. How can I contact her?
 
First I would check really obvious things like accidentally having "hide site from search engines" ticked in Wordpress, or disallowing everything in robots.txt.

I have done both (due to copy and paste form a test environment without checking this things)
 
This is my last two years. Very odd boost from Nov 5 2018 to jan 20 2019 ???
Screenshot 2019-11-27 at 19.33.02.webp


But on average we went down and recently clawed our way back up

I have no explanation
 
Forums will continue to be downranked as they create low quality low density content. Especially the forums without properly threaded threads like Xenforo.

Xenforo creates chit chat content that is best done on Social Media.
 
Top Bottom