First off guys -
So happy to have migrated to this forum from vBulletin. You guys have put an unbelievable amount of thought into everything and it really shows.
I recently have been forced to become an SEO expert as our site has suffered massive ranking drops in the last year or two. The "best practices" can get so elaborate and involved that I now understand why only some websites rank well, and most don't.
I had just finished renaming about 60 thread Titles on my forum for better display and ranking in Google, then had a horrified moment where I realized that every time I renamed the title, the URL was also getting changed.
Naturally, thinking I had literally just de-indexed all my top links from Google by changing their URLs, I flipped out. But then I remembered this is XenForo, not vBulletin.
I did another test and found that all old URLs were properly redirecting to the new URLs. In addition to that, I checked the server error code being delivered, and it is a proper 301 redirect, which will tell Google to update its index!
This may sound like a "duh" to everyone but you have no idea how many CMS systems out there don't know to do this. So I had to come here and say thanks for not sucking at what you guys do.
So happy to have migrated to this forum from vBulletin. You guys have put an unbelievable amount of thought into everything and it really shows.
I recently have been forced to become an SEO expert as our site has suffered massive ranking drops in the last year or two. The "best practices" can get so elaborate and involved that I now understand why only some websites rank well, and most don't.
I had just finished renaming about 60 thread Titles on my forum for better display and ranking in Google, then had a horrified moment where I realized that every time I renamed the title, the URL was also getting changed.
Naturally, thinking I had literally just de-indexed all my top links from Google by changing their URLs, I flipped out. But then I remembered this is XenForo, not vBulletin.
I did another test and found that all old URLs were properly redirecting to the new URLs. In addition to that, I checked the server error code being delivered, and it is a proper 301 redirect, which will tell Google to update its index!
This may sound like a "duh" to everyone but you have no idea how many CMS systems out there don't know to do this. So I had to come here and say thanks for not sucking at what you guys do.
