I Did Something Wrong With SEO [SoS]

[TheBigK]

Fellow Members,

I think I've messed up something (possibly robots.txt) on my server and the traffic seems to be going down.

1. We moved our site from vB ( located in /forum directory) to XF (located in /community directory).
2. The page rank moved from 5 to 0 and recovered within two months. Now it shows 'N/A'.
3. Upon typing our site name 'CrazyEngineers' in Google, the site links would show :

Try: http://www.google.co.in/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=crazyengineers

> Forums ( /community/ ) , but since removing all the entries in robots.txt, it now shows the old (/forum).

Note that the /forum directory still exists as I've redirects in place.

4. site:crazyengineers.com/community/ search in Google throws a very small number (~50k) of links than earlier (~250k).

Can someone quickly inspect that's going wrong? Why isn't google picking up '/community/' anymore?

 

[bambua]

What type of redirect is it on your forums directory? Also on your sitemap.xml generator for wordpress, did you have it include any of the links in community? I'm pretty sure in that plugin there is a way to do that. I browsed through your forum at random, and a good portion of the pages when I searched for their title in google, I did get results.

 

[CTXMedia]

I've just done a Google search "site:www.crazyengineers.com/community/" and all I'm getting back is member profile page links (I gave up after 12 pages of results). No forum threads/discussions, however when I visit using my browser I can view threads as a guest so forum permissions seem okay.

Post a copy of your robots.txt file and the .htaccess file in the root of your hosting directory so we can see what's going on.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[TheBigK]

It's the regular 301 (permanent) redirect. The sitemap on Wordpress does not include any link to the community as there's a separate XF plugin that submits sitemaps for community.

The problem is that Google Site Links to /forum/ instead of /community/ like it used to for quite some time after migration.

It's also true that site:crazyengineers.com/community has started listin all the member pages than the site links. But it does list thread title if you go deeper into the search results. It wasn't like that before!

Robots.txt looks like this -

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Also, our PR for /community/ dropped from 5 to N/A in recent times. I wonder what's going wrong.

 

[CTXMedia]

What about the .htaccess file? It may (or may not) include redirects.

 

[TheBigK]

Attaching the htaccess files for root , forum and community -

 

[oloman]

site:http://www.crazyengineers.com/community/threads
52 300 results

 

[oloman]

The "site:" is not very accurate anyway.

You said "traffic seems to be going down", do you have an analytics screen?

 

[TheBigK]

But what I noticed is that in the recent times; 'online users' have gone down from 800-1200 to about 600-700 at any time.

 

[TheBigK]

site:http://www.crazyengineers.com/community/threads
52 300 results

That number used to be ~200,000. Not sure if it's normal.

 

[oloman]

For me, there is nothing wrong. Maybe wait some days because Easter vacation...

 

[TheBigK]

Well, okay. Is there a reason why Google started picking up /forum/ in site links after showing /community/ for few weeks? Why this sudden change of mind, Google? Also, our PR for /community has gone away. I already notice that our search positions have dipped a bit.

 

[TheBigK]

Are my htaccess & robots.txt files alright?

 

[CTXMedia]

They appear to be - and the redirect from "/forums/" to "/threads/" appears to be working okay.

I've checked today and I'm seeing an increase in the total of indexed URLs to 57,250 and some of the "threads" are now appearing in Google's results, so that's better than yesterday. Maybe see how it goes over the next few days?

 

[TheBigK]

@Clickfinity: Thanks. The redirects were all set fine and they were working. I spent considerable time in the past to ensure that redirects work fine. I am only concerned because of the sudden drop of PR from 5 to N/A.

The other change I made in the recent times is the Adsense placements. Can someone comment on my adsense ad-placements on the threads? The sendgrid ad will go away in next 2 days. But am I being penalized for placing two ads above the fold? Would you call my placement 'agressive'?