Google Traffic Going Down After Migration

TheBigK

Well-known member
We converted our vB4+vBSEO board on (update) December 01 and I've been noticing a decline in the Google organic traffic. I'm keeping a check on how many pages are indexed by Google and surprisingly Google's got larger number of URLs listed. My best guess is that it's because of the new URLs Google's discovered because of Xenforo.

The old links are being removed from Google's index at the rate of about 3k URLs/day and new URLs are being added at the rate of about 2k/day.

We do not have a sitemap because I'm not satisfied with the current addons. Can someone suggest steps to recover the traffic?
 
Would people need more information ?

Did you use VBSEO redirects ?
Did your drops occur during Google's large changes ?

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Did you migrate to xF because of declining forum use ?
Are signups down ? Some people say forums are passe and Facebook is where people "hangout".

Doesn't Google Analytics have lots of detailed information ?
 
Okay, let me answer one by one -

1. Yes, redirects are in place and are working perfectly fine.
2. We've all original content and the site traffic didn't change negatively during Panda Updates.
3. Didn't migrate to XF because of declining forum use. We migrated because vB releases upgrades every week and we can't afford to spend time upgrading the forums every time. Plus the upgrades were not smooth as they were with vB 3x
4. Signups are down by a littler percentage. Nothing much to worry about, though.
5. Some people say forums are passe and Facebook is where people "hangout". Not sure what to answer. The answer is yes and no. Our main problem is our traffic from India which does convert to members but they are incredibly bad at posting content.
 
Have you tracked how your nice Wordpress section is doing in terms of google traffic ?
Wordpress is excellent. If you check our Alexa rank its currently in the 17-18k range and going up. Sept-December is usually the lowest traffic period for our site; however, with the redirects in place, I was expecting the traffic to go down by about 20-30%. It's down by about 50% since last 4 days.

PS: But regular members love the new site.
 
This thread is geared towards troubleshooting some structural issues that might be causing some issues for you.
At the end of the day, it will be hard to decide what changes might be the "root cause".
You might want to concentrate on "what content" do you members and future members want ?
How can I deliver it ?
 
Well, I'm not complaining about content. We've few members who are exceptionally good at it. I'm more concerned about the changes I need to do at the technical level so that Google gives its love back. I know 8 days is just too early to expect from Google to accept the changes to our site.

I'm looking for answers regarding the steps I can take to make the process speedier.

PS: I'd also like to have opinions from people about 'Forums Are Dead. Are They?'. XF is betting its future on the belief that Forums Will Live.
 
Well yeah. I had a conversation with DigitalPoint and he said sitemap is just a Google toy for the people who say Google doesn't look at their site. Apart from patience; is there anything I can try.

Slap button. Ha! (y)
 
I had this problem when I went from vB 3.8.4 to IPB last year - it didn't seem to matter what I did, it simply took time for Google to reflect all the changes. It levelled out after about 4-6 months.

I take it your site is running nice and fast and Google is able to crawl your server at a good rate?
 
I had this problem when I went from vB 3.8.4 to IPB last year - it didn't seem to matter what I did, it simply took time for Google to reflect all the changes. It levelled out after about 4-6 months.

I take it your site is running nice and fast and Google is able to crawl your server at a good rate?
Thank you for your response. Yes, Google is already indexing the site and adding new links at a fast rate. However, the traffic is down. I think it just doesn't matter whether you've all the links in Google. The question is do they appear at the same position for keywords as earlier.

I know Cycle Chat migrated to XF. How's Google traffic to your website before and after the migration?
 
Google Webmaster > settings > crawling speed: very fast should help you.
Thanks. I've read that ideally one shouldn't touch that setting. But since it's there; we can change the speed. Have you used it on your own? If yes, what was your experience?
 
Google reindexed my page much faster with the highest setting. You can see the amount of pages google indexes in Google Webmaster > Diagnosis

For a few days I had a false robot.txt setting to disallow all search engines. My visitors from google were decreasing on a very noticeable level these days.
 
Google reindexed my page much faster with the highest setting. You can see the amount of pages google indexes in Google Webmaster > Diagnosis

For a few days I had a false robot.txt setting to disallow all search engines. My visitors from google were decreasing on a very noticeable level these days.
How long did Google take to remove all your old links? I think I'll go and change the indexing speed.
 
It takes around a week or two. I remember having lots of duplicate links indexed by google. You can see which content google indexed by putting this into google: "search:domain.com" and then only display the results from the last day.

Google is very good at reindexing your page, if you tell google that it can work faster than usual it will be happy. Google does not like it if your old web pages become 404 pages. So go through google webmaster > diagnosis and take care of all these pages.
 
I just have the old 'tag' pages 404; but I care less about them. Threads and member profiles are redirecting well. I've upped the crawl rate and Google says it will take a day or two to activate it. I hope this will work.
 
I'r remove the tag.php pages in robot.txt so the spider knows it will not be indexed now or in the feature and the spider should not even try to get them.
 
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