"Google May 2020 Core Update" affecting your xF Forum?

Just read an article in the NY Times about Sridhar Ramaswamy, former head of Google advertising:

"The relentless pressure to maintain Google’s growth, he said, had come at a heavy cost to the company’s users. Useful search results were pushed down the page to squeeze in more advertisements, and privacy was sacrificed for online tracking tools to keep tabs on what ads people were seeing."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-executive.html
 
The report somewhat brightens Google's approach and its motives. Thank you for linking.
As of now, search results are controlled by "shareholders" and they now also receive advertising revenues.

So I don't have to "puzzle" about anything ...
 
That is why I am defunding Google
They are censoring Youtube demonetsing channels and feeding me useless videos.
I tell all of my friends not to use Google or Chrome.
 
Along the streets Big Elephant was led,
To show him off, most likely.
Since Elephants are not a common thing to see
A crowd of gapers followed on his heels.
All of a sudden Pug springs up in front of them.
And seeing Elephant, it raises a great rumpus,
It lunges, barks and howls
And does its best to pick a quarrel.
"Hey neighbor, stop the fuss,"
A mutt intones, "You? Deal with Elephant?
Look at you barking yourself hoarse, and he just strolls
Nonplussed
And doesn't care one bit about your noise."
"Ho ho!" Pug says,
"That's just what I enjoy,
Since I can be a real tough guy
Without a single blow or bruise.
That way, the other dogs will say:
"To bark at Elephant this Pug
Must be a real strong mug!"
(с)
 
You may be right. However, there are open doors in wordpress. There are MySQL vulnerabilities. No security vulnerabilities in xenforo system. I put the security first

With all due respect, that's nonsense. There's no exploits in Wordpress. I have used it on shared/vps and even dedi environments on sites i didn't give a crap about and nothing happened.

World's top 1000 sites run wordpress, really now it's foolish to think they will go with it if it has open doors.
 
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I setup up a Wordpress blog 5 years ago and all I got was spam.
Never again.
Its only popular because every webhost pushes it.
And its easy to get going If you can chose a template from the millions of templates availabe- good luck
 
We also got hit starting on May 4th & 5th, with a net result of losing approximately 58% of our Search impressions, and 51% drop in clicks.

Example:
May 4th: 127,012 Impressions / 5105 Clicks
May 6th: 54,994 Impressions / 2583 Clicks

We have a Wordpress website, with a Xenforo forum, with the lion-share (95%+) of the traffic going to the forum.

Looks like the Wordpress section of the site got hit harder than the forum, from a % drop in search impressions and clicks, but since it's only a small part of the total traffic, it's not as impactful as the loss of forum traffic.

As a business, we now have to figure out our path forward, to see what other things we can do to attract new traffic to replace the lost traffic.

It's a challenging undertaking for sure, since there really is no specific action you can take with forum content that is sure & known to help to improve your position in SERPs. At least, nothing I am aware of.

If you use systems like Vigilink or similar services that link content to your affiliate accounts, pay attention to the second to last item on that list.
Very interesting. I'm curious if that is why Viglink dropped their "Insert" feature recently (the feature that auto-affiliates/links words).

I wonder if we dropped Viglink altogether, what would happen. Might be worth a test.

Trying to avoid using WordPress and a bridge, although that might be the way I have to go if the Google Gods prefer it.
We just wrote a plugin to show some/all of our Xenforo forum Category nodes, and the forums within them, on the Wordpress home page. No bridge needed :)
 
This is interesting, just pulled this blurb from the "Affiliate Program" section of Google's quality guidelines.

Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users.

The slightly earlier parts could be somewhat telling too:
...build a loyal readership
...on the subject you are writing about

Does that mean they want to see a site that is largely content/article driven, with a community-based component primarily to generate discussions about the written content?

I'm curious if the sites with forums that have seen improved rankings after the May 2020 update are those with more activity in the content (articles) section of their sites, or in the forums.

Regardless, let's not act like victims. There are many smart people here. Let's see if we can help each other find a way through this.

Every business experiences obstacles -- how you work through those obstacles is what matters.
 
Perhaps their view on "user generated content" ties in.

A random forum post may or may not contain info percieved as valuable compared to a news/blog article designed for sharing information.

Some forum posts are just chit chat and Google may not know how, nor want to, always try to differentiate btw posts.

I wonder if XF post types will contain schema and seo that will tell google, yes this is an article, and yes it should be treated differently than a conversational post.
 
Regardless, let's not act like victims. There are many smart people here. Let's see if we can help each other find a way through this.
I am trying a couple techniques as well here including loading a bunch of unique attractive content for each node. They're in development. I agree we should all come together and find solutions to offset our boards being deranked.
 
I wonder if XF post types will contain schema and seo that will tell google, yes this is an article, and yes it should be treated differently than a conversational post.

I've just been reading about 2.2, with the different thread types (Discussion, Poll, Article, Question).

I haven't seen anything yet about whether or not they're using different schema types, but I would be surprised if they weren't.

Back to reading about 2.2 :)
 
I've just been reading about 2.2, with the different thread types (Discussion, Poll, Article, Question).

I haven't seen anything yet about whether or not they're using different schema types, but I would be surprised if they weren't.

Back to reading about 2.2 :)

It's affecting many boards from XF1 to XF2. Not sure the changes in 2.2 will affect anything. It requires link building and content changes.
 
@arn Very important to have those schema implemented for different post type, especially the Q&A one.

Running off latest 1.5, we had to manually go in and fix this. Google also informs you that you need to update this in search console.
 
I am so glad that I don't rely on Google
The fact that fourms (and busnisses) can suffer a 50% drop in clicks or income due to some unknown change in theri search algorthim is disgusting and despicable.
And as said above
If you change your keywords or other settings, it may take months before you notice any change up or down!
 
I am so glad that I don't rely on Google
The fact that fourms (and busnisses) can suffer a 50% drop in clicks or income due to some unknown change in theri search algorthim is disgusting and despicable.
And as said above
If you change your keywords or other settings, it may take months before you notice any change up or down!

You’ve mentioned that you don’t like or support Google at least a dozen times in this thread. We get it, you don’t like Google.

Let the people with earnings loss try and figure out a solution without constantly downing Google.
 
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