Have most forums lost traffic from Google in Aug/Sep/Oct 2018?

V

vij

Well-known member
I know there has been a major Google update in August that affected all types of sites, but I have noticed forums in particular (mine and several others I follow) have suffered quite a bit in September and October too - actually most of the forums (especially health/fitness related) have suffered. Some very good forums now receive fraction of the traffic they enjoyed pre August. Checked using semrush - while they are not very accurate, the trend they show is usually right.

Have you been affected?
 
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Same here from September but i think this was related to mobile-first index switch. Google crawled a lot more, also more pages indexed. Crawling and pages indexed is dropping now and visitors/ranking increasing.
 
Same here. We have lost so much traffic in the last couple of months. I thought i had done something wrong. Maybe not!
One thing i have noticed is that all the sites that have overtaken us in the top spots of rankings are running IPB?
does the SEO addon rectify any of the rich snippets , markup etc?
 
Davey-UK said:
Same here. We have lost so much traffic in the last couple of months. I thought i had done something wrong. Maybe not!
One thing i have noticed is that all the sites that have overtaken us in the top spots of rankings are running IPB?
does the SEO addon rectify any of the rich snippets , markup etc?
Click to expand...

Markup/rich snippets is the same for most forumsoftware and has no direct effect on ranking. Those IPB forums that rank higher could also have lost traffic, this is for many forums and regular websites the case in these few months.

I saw a lot of extra crawling when google send me an email that my forum was transfering to mobile-first indexing, but could be a coincedence (a lot of ranking things going on with google). In the new search console i can see a lot of extra pages crawled and ready to be indexed. I'm thinking that januari will go up again (hopefully).
 
As sad as it sounds: be glad that you still have 50%.
Google keeps adding new updates and more and more forums get hit by this. https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

And its not only that more sites are getting hit. Its also that the same sites get hit further. So if you loose a significant percentage of your traffic now, then its likely that you may loose even more on subsequent Google updates.

It seems to me that XF needs a major 2019 SEO update to avoid a lot of forums getting killed off and new forums never reaching critical mass.
 
Any difference between XF1 and XF2 users?

I am using XF1 for the moment.

What i did notice is when forums block /attachments/ in their robots.txt they do a little better. Could be coincedence but i saw in webmaster tools that google has some trouble detecting this as images at once because thet do not end .jpg or .png
 
Also when you block them for visitors/guests they are shown as thumbnails (/data) that end as .jpg

Blocking /attachments would only block pdf and other files then. Those also have little seo benefit because they are dead ends (and give a 403 when you don't show to guests).

Pages would also load faster and google can crawl faster/more.

I'm gone test this to see if it has any effect.
 
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