Have most forums lost traffic from Google since April 2024?

Perhaps look into why your own efforts aren't riding the rising tide?

Because 99% of people in recent years prefer to use social media (especially Facebook groups which are the alternative to Forums)...
So with the exception of forums that deal with topics that cannot be used on social media, traffic in forums has dropped by 99% in recent years...
If Google decides to implement a Forum section it will be a good thing, it will certainly not bring forums back to the old days...
Whoever says otherwise is lying and knows they are lying!
 
  • Like
Reactions: xml
Because 99% of people in recent years prefer to use social media (especially Facebook groups which are the alternative to Forums)...
So with the exception of forums that deal with topics that cannot be used on social media, traffic in forums has dropped by 99% in recent years...
If Google decides to implement a Forum section it will be a good thing, it will certainly not bring forums back to the old days...
Whoever says otherwise is lying and knows they are lying!

I never said anything about bringing back the old says.

Google did implement a forum section. It's not an "if".

Forum traffic has not dropped by 99% - that's not being truthful. The drop was large, but it certainly wasn't 99%. And somewhere around 2018, overall forum traffic in most niches leveled off, and with some niches starting a slow upward (with much of that growth in avenues like Discourse).
 
They have to have some kind of private arrangement where they get to use their content for Google Gemini.
 
Some other thoughts:
1. Google rolled out a very large March 2024 core update that was especially volatile. It took several weeks for it to fully roll out.


2. The volatility of Google once again goes to show how important it is to never put all of your eggs into a single basket. In this case, never rely only on traffic from one source. You should invest in your own direct traffic whether referral traffic from other sites and search engines of direct traffic from your own marketing initiatives (newsletters, reengagement emails, etc).
 
Some other thoughts:
1. Google rolled out a very large March 2024 core update that was especially volatile. It took several weeks for it to fully roll out.


2. The volatility of Google once again goes to show how important it is to never put all of your eggs into a single basket. In this case, never rely only on traffic from one source. You should invest in your own direct traffic whether referral traffic from other sites and search engines of direct traffic from your own marketing initiatives (newsletters, reengagement emails, etc).
Well yes, most of Google's core updates are like that. Welcome to the world of SEO!

You should promote your forums on other platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. You can easily attract new users from these sources if you target them correctly, either by buying ad slots or by taking the time to share your content on social media.

The internet is vast, so there’s no reason not to diversify your marketing efforts. A newsletter won’t boost your forum's traffic as effectively as broader marketing strategies will.

Go after the market and direct them towards your forum.
 
Last edited:
Some other thoughts:
1. Google rolled out a very large March 2024 core update that was especially volatile. It took several weeks for it to fully roll out.


2. The volatility of Google once again goes to show how important it is to never put all of your eggs into a single basket. In this case, never rely only on traffic from one source. You should invest in your own direct traffic whether referral traffic from other sites and search engines of direct traffic from your own marketing initiatives (newsletters, reengagement emails, etc).

In other words - you must run it as a business (with marketing efforts and expenses). Just having high-quality stuff is apparently no longer enough. :)

Google says it wants to see stuff written by experts and for the readers (i.e. "not written for SEO"), but as far as I can see, such stuff is mostly gone from their search results. Could be wrong, but that's my impression at least.
 
was assuming the discussion was going in the direction of more general search engine optimisation which the update installation per se won’t help much without some input and configuration from site owner.
Having said that the ability to noindex on a per thread basis could be very useful for SEO. But the mere existence of the feature without admin intervention won't do anything.
 
I did not see a relevant effect. Small forum, only exists since two years and German language only. But in a very special niche, very active for the size and with high quality content. I invested considerable time to manually feed the Google index in the first year or so, after a while Google started to crawl very actively. So I reduced the manual feeding to almost zero, I only feed it with new special threads and pages with very high quality content into the search console manually. Most times it turns out unnecessary: today new threads on my forum are often indexed literally minutes after they are posted.

About 2/3 of new visitors of my forum come via Google. Other search engines are basically irrelevant - i.e. Bing has indexed way more pages than Google, still the traffic is not even 10% of what comes through Google. Also, there's not that many links leading to us from other webpages and thus only a very limited amount of visitors through that channel.

Search results and clicks have been on the rise constantly and still are. At a low level, but growing. Development of clicks over the last 12 months:
Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-27 um 14.50.38.webp

The rise has however slowed down a little bit over the last months. Average position did not really improve (rather became slightly worse) and impressions also rather went down a little than going up. But both not too dramatically and with volatility. July and August are a bit of an outlayer anyway due to holiday season.

Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-27 um 14.54.23.webp


In search console there are no relevant hints that I would have to improve anything. PageSpeedInsights complains about the size of the JavaScript - not much I can do about it. As my forum is small but vital, non commercial and has no ads I do not mind about traffic, ranking or new visitors much - I monitor it mostly out of curiosity.

The only interesting effect that I saw was a massive loss in indexed pages at the beginning of June: From 32xx pages I went down to 2700 all of a sudden for no obvious reason, so a loss of almost 20%. But from mid June on it started to build up again, also with a jump of a couple of 100 pages out of the blue and for quite a while now I am at over 3200 pages again - but there is no noticable growth, almost stuck, despite new threads getting posted.

Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-27 um 14.56.04.webp

Discover has never been a big thing for us and barely ever happend. This barely ever has however become a little bit more frequent in the meantime:

Bildschirmfoto 2024-08-27 um 14.53.45.webp

I do reliably get between 60-90 new forum members signing up every month and the average of signups per day has been slowly on the rise constantly since the two years that the forum exists. That's what counts in the end. Don't want to become too big anyway - would only create extra work. ;)
 
- 84% in august compared to last year :(
I still don't understand why
Can be many reasons. For the question of the thread the more relevant KPI would be "new users with source "google organic" oder alternatively klicks via Google Search Console.
Has your degrading been a slow, continuous process or rather a sudden jump? And if it was a jump or jump-alike: When did it happen?
 
Can be many reasons. For the question of the thread the more relevant KPI would be "new users with source "google organic" oder alternatively klicks via Google Search Console.
Has your degrading been a slow, continuous process or rather a sudden jump? And if it was a jump or jump-alike: When did it happen?
Sudden in April
@smallwheels any help?
 
Last edited:
@smallwheels any help?
I am clearly not an expert here, unfortunately. But definitively this: 👇
Without direct access to GSC / Google Analytics data is impossible to say for sure.
Also, while you can configure the timeframe for Hits and Klicks in Search Console I think the indexing data is only shown for the last three months and this cannot be changed (at least I don't know how - would be interested in this as well). Which means the data for April is not accessible regarding indexing.

Would also helpful to have a log what has changed on the forum side (like addons, updates etc. around the relevant time frame). And still, even with all this at hand it keeps being digging in the mud and searching for probabilities. Unfortunately.
 
You can get expanded data by going to Search Results tab on left and clicking on Date pill at the top.
Yes, but this is the search results. I mentioned myseltf that there the timeframe ist adjustable. I was talking about indexing and on this page said option is missing.
 
Last edited:
I recomment to check for spam: users website links, spammers put porn, drags, & outgoing emails. Only these 2 can really hurt you website, when you really lost more than 1k organic traffic.
 
Back
Top Bottom