Google Traffic Going Down After Migration

[Carlos]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Google Webmaster, Yahoo Explorer [which recently merged into Bing Webmaster].

Add your site to those services, and the visits will start climbing.

My migration story: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/codforums-experiencing-growth.19188/

 

[TheBigK]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Google Webmaster, Yahoo Explorer [which recently merged into Bing Webmaster].

Add your site to those services, and the visits will start climbing.

My migration story: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/codforums-experiencing-growth.19188/

Got the site in Bing Webmaster already. Bing sends minimum traffic. I sometimes hate Google's Monopoly. I think I'll start working on Google killer .

I just hope the Google gives their love back to the site asap.

 

[Carlos]

Well, you have no choice but to adhere to google's myriads of opportunities. Google's Webmaster program benefits sites like yours, you don't even need a sitemap anymore.

Google also launched Google+ and + pages.

Google can send you thousands of hits if you play the cards right. A community that large? Take advantage of google, man.

EDIT: This is the 2,000th post!

 

[TheLaw]

IMHO and experience:

(1) I agree with digitalpoint about the sitemap. Wouldn't worry about it (despite some who place great importance on it.)
(2) Changing URLs would likely result in temporary drops. Besides the obvious reindexing issues, there are other factors at play when you 301 your pages. Most report it takes a few weeks of gradual building to return. If the software is sound and fast, I'd say that the overall long term effect will be apparently shortly but you're far too quick to come to conclusions at the moment.
(3) Google's webmaster program/tools helps diagnose issues but probably doesn't change your traffic by virtue of having them.
(4) Google+ and +pages are a nice addition but will not change your traffic either. Just another item to put on the agenda. Ironically my Facebook page visits are climbing and I'm not sure why. Takes a while for these to have any effect.

My thought - 8 days is very quick, stay the course, keep it together, make all the improvements under the hood you can in the meanwhile.

 

[Carlos]

Google's webmaster program/tools helps diagnose issues but probably doesn't change your traffic by virtue of having them.

This is the only thing that I disagree with, because Google's Webmaster sends google's spiders, and crawlers to your site. This in turn index'es your site quicker.

Putting it on Google Webmaster is like telling google "Index my site please!"

This is why I think that a sitemap is useless for previously established sites. The only time to worry about sitemaps is when you're building a new site.

 

[TheLaw]

This is the only thing that I disagree with, because Google's Webmaster sends google's spiders, and crawlers to your site. This in turn index'es your site quicker. Putting it on Google Webmaster is like telling google "Index my site please!"

Google is already crawling his site. Not sure there is any profound difference between this and site submission either. I don't think GWT does any more for you simply because you're signed up. You get it when they provide it.

 

[Carlos]

Google is already crawling his site. Not sure there is any profound difference between this and site submission either. I don't think GWT does any more for you simply because you're signed up. You get it when they provide it.

I think you misunderstand me when I mentioned Google Webmaster. You're thinking of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), I'm thinking Google Webmaster.

It's important to get re-indexed via GW, especially if you change softwares - which for google means a change of URL structures. If your site changes canonically, then your whole ranking drops. Which is why it is absolutely important to try and get re-indexed immediately. It takes more than a week to get re-indexed, at the very worst, it takes months for re-indexing to occur without submitting your site to google.

If your site is slow to be re-indexed, that means google can't find your content with the new canonical setup.

 

[ENF]

I think you misunderstand me when I mentioned Google Webmaster. You're thinking of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), I'm thinking Google Webmaster.

It's important to get re-indexed via GW, especially if you change softwares - which for google means a change of URL structures. If your site changes canonically, then your whole ranking drops. Which is why it is absolutely important to try and get re-indexed immediately. It takes more than a week to get re-indexed, at the very worst, it takes months for re-indexing without submitting it to google.

If your site is slow to be re-indexed, that means google can't find your content with the canonical setup.

Forgive me, maybe I'm missing something. What exactly is "Google Webmaster", isn't it the same thing as Google Webmaster Central/Tools? Is this another too I'm just unaware of? [insert confused smiley]

 

[Carlos]

Forgive me, maybe I'm missing something. What exactly is "Google Webmaster", isn't it the same thing as Google Webmaster Central/Tools? Is this another too I'm just unaware of? [insert confused smiley]

When you want to submit to google without waiting for them to do it themselves, Google Webmaster gives you the tools to submit to them directly. This is the same place where you put your sitemaps or RSS feeds.

That expression I mentioned earlier? "Index my site please!"

Webmaster TOOLS is a tool to help you reach more customers with keywords. How to increase your keyword density. It can be integrated with Analytics for tracking progress of your incoming keywords.

EDIT: I just logged into my account. It seems as though they swapped the naming of the programs. :-/

I had thought there were TWO Webmaster links, one for submitting your links to google, and the other for keywords density as mentioned.

Meh, I'm having a headache now.

 

[Marcus]

For a complete website redesign when all links change, I would definitely use a sitemap, if only to submit the sitemap only once. After that you can submit sitemaps or not, that might not be a big difference.

 

[CTXMedia]

Providing you have 301 redirects in place (interpreted as "moved permanently") then any crawler will be advised of the change and should update the listings in the engine accordingly.

 

[Sadik B]

If you have 301 redirects in place, then do not worry so much. Google takes about two weeks to reindex everything. Keep a watch on any crawler errors in Webmaster tools and correct them, if any are found. Another thing is, it's December and as you would no doubt be aware tech / students traffic goes down in Dec.

I quite like your site by the way. A year back I was considering starting an Engineering community, (I am a comp. science egg btw) but could not get to it due to time constraints.

 

[TheBigK]

If you have 301 redirects in place, then do not worry so much. Google takes about two weeks to reindex everything. Keep a watch on any crawler errors in Webmaster tools and correct them, if any are found. Another thing is, it's December and as you would no doubt be aware tech / students traffic goes down in Dec.

I quite like your site by the way. A year back I was considering starting an Engineering community, (I am a comp. science egg btw) but could not get to it due to time constraints.

Thanks, Sadik. Jan - April and July - October are peak seasons for our community. I'm keeping a watch on GWT. Nothing looks out of place at the moment. Google's rapidly deleting old links from index and adding new links.

 

[Carlos]

Thanks, Sadik. Jan - April and July - October are peak seasons for our community. I'm keeping a watch on GWT. Nothing looks out of place at the moment. Google's rapidly deleting old links from index and adding new links.

That a boy!

You have exactly one month to capitalize. You and your members have to work together on posting, posting, and posting. By January, the traffic will spike. Maybe even earlier, like an early Christmas present!

BTW, I apologize for earlier, if you were offended.

 

[Deebs]

That a boy!

You have exactly one month to capitalize. You and your members have to work together on posting, posting, and posting. By January, the traffic will spike. Maybe even earlier, like an early Christmas present!

BTW, I apologize for earlier, if you were offended.

Sorry but where do you get the "exactly one month" from?

 

[Carlos]

Go back up and read BigK's post again. He said January is one of the peak months.

He has January, February, and March for winter season.

2nd half of March is spring time, so April to May is for spring.

Between July and October are the only time he has to wait for when the forum takes a dip.

If his site covered the technology area, other than just engineering, June would have benefited him too. Just like CES in January.

 

[Deebs]

Seriously, sitemaps are not the that important. Once a site has been "looked" at by a search engine they will index everything from that site.

 

[Carlos]

Seriously, sitemaps are not the that important. Once a site has been "looked" at by a search engine they will index everything from that site.

We weren't talking about sitemaps. It's just one part of the whole GWT program.

Re-indexing your site requires GWT to recognize your site as "added." So any time that you change softwares, change URL structures, Google knows immediately. If you don't have your site added to GWT, what I said earlier rings true, it will take a long time for the site to be re-indexed. Which isn't a good thing if you're preparing for events.

 

[Deebs]

No it won't. If your site is "ranking" high in the search results and is always being displayed then it will always be in the same position. If you have 301 redirects then Google and anyone else will rewrite those urls to the new ones. You do not need a sitemap to do that. Btw, if you didn't realise, once a search engine has your site in their target they do not need a sitemap.

 

[Carlos]

No it won't. If your site is "ranking" high in the search results and is always being displayed then it will always be in the same position.

This thread disagrees with that statement.

His traffic dropped because of the URL structure change via the transfer from vB to xenForo. That's what this thread is about.

The slowness of re-indexing is a lot of factors, one of them is not having it in GWT.

It's not entirely about the sitemaps as I said before, the redirection didn't work as the guy thought it would. Granted, it'll improve later, but it seems to go slower than expected to him.

CODForums changed softwares, it was in GWT, and on the change-over the site starts climbing. What's more surprising is that the site changed pagerank on the move.

CODForums had the same vB4 + vBSEO setup... and I didn't even use the redirection script!