TNCclubman
Well-known member
Its phenomenal. It takes only a couple of days for my posts to be #1 on google against a long standing competing website that has been online since 2004. (They're using phpbb) lol
Just wanted to commend the built in SEO of xenforo.
- Thread starter TNCclubman
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Jeffin
Well-known member
I have to admit my forum took a toll when I converted it to xf from vb. It's because I didn't redirect any url and I still haven't. So search engines are taking their own time deleting and adding new urls from my board and as of now it has reached the same level of activity as it used to be prior to conversion. That is awesome! Remember NO URL REDIRECTIONS in my case. 
Below is the stats for your reference.
Below is the stats for your reference.
Sadik B
Well-known member
I don't understand why you guys don't do URL redirection? Why lose a months's traffic? Moreover some pages may never get re-indexed or the same quality of traffic later. Yes, XF is indeed very good due to it's semantic markup, it's very easy for bots to separate content from code and it has a low code to content ratio. That's what I have always done on all my VBulletin sites as well. I spend nearly 2-3days after a new VB installation removing fluff like posting permissions, post icons etc. XF has a clean output by default which means it plays nice with search engines.
Jeffin
Well-known member
I didn't have the technical knowledge to do re-directions or the money hire someone.
With the vbseotoxf add-on someone posted we require an xml file from vbseo installation on the forum which I didn't backup. I converted straightaway to xf long time back when these addons weren't available. So I lost that opportunity. Anyway, no regrets because I don't like to regret. lol.
Carlos
Well-known member
Some websites DON'T need redirection. For example, I own a network of websites BUILT around my brand. I had a .me domain and I let the domain expire because I can't risk too much money anymore. Its come to a point where I really don't need anyone's help anymore. I have learnt the in's and out's of SEO. By no means am I saying I'm the SEO expert, oh no. I'm not going down that path. I am sayin' that to solidify my point.
A few years ago, I did all this - domain changing. I tested many ideas, many tactics. I have learnt that I had done the right thing; build a network around my brand - it has for the most part; accelerated growth on my site(s). It keeps search engines coming back for more because of the age of the backlinks - so whoever tells you the age of the domain doesn't matter; don't listen. Google may say that it doesn't matter, but its true for backlinks. Because an older website's pagerank usually brings better 'traffic' than a new website does.
I digress tho; this isn't a debate about SEO by itself, its about the SEO features in xenforo. This thread is a little misleading for me; I have tested 2 different niches for xenforo. One is a very popular niche - Modern Warfare and is not registering members. The other is gaining a lot of hype, and heat for the last few weeks now, and its a Marvel Vs Capcom 3 site. I have been getting a lot of traffic due to my hard work towards that niche. Its not bringing members across the bridge, but the traffic's there. I've seen my site climb from rank #5 to #1 in just a month - and the big gain from that is that I have been seeing a lot of keywords relating to the niche and the site's name.
If you want to know more about my insights, its in this thread.
I converted from phpBB to vBulletin to XenForo so URL redirection was not an option for me due to the double import.
I would have had to match up two different import logs and then get custom code written.
Sadik B
Well-known member
I didn't have the technical knowledge to do re-directions or the money hire someone.
I understand the technical hurdle, I have done some site conversions so I forget that not everyone gets into the technicalities
But still, it's a tremendous loss not 301ing your links. I am not saying that Google does not re-index you, sure it does, but it can take between 1 to 2 months to get all your links back in the index, also depends on the size and traffic of the site but that's a rough estimate. One doesn't notice the difference much for a small site, but for larger sites with heavy dependency on SE traffic 2 months of lost traffic and revenue can be huge.
Well u do like to give yourself a lot of self-importance, don't ya
But seriously, yes if you have good amount of linkbacks from several other sites, where if you update the links within your own network, that can quicken up your indexing, so maybe you can afford to not worry about redirection. But not everyone has that luxury, so good old 301 is still the way ppl use to tell Google that they have moved.
Why not? only thing you need is a mapping table between ids. If i was doing this, i would have kept a backup of the phpbb database. What I would have done is write a query to map my thread ids between my old phpbb thread table and my new XF thread table. Then I would see how phpbb is constructing the thread url and how XF is constructing thread url. I would then write an sql query to come up with a url mapping table. Then on this url map table i would use a select statement to get all my 301s which i can dump in my htaccess or apache httpd conf. Yes it requires some custom work. Of course, it's worthwhile only if the site was getting heavy SE traffic which u couldn't afford to lose for a month or two.
Thought I'd update this thread.
Although my page appeared at number 1 when searching for "2011 Race Hub", it was nowhere to be seen when searching for "F1 2011 Race Hub".
After adding "F1" to the Page title, it is now appearing at No.1 in both Google.com and Google.co.uk.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp...oq=f1+2011+race+hub&pbx=1&fp=591c13988e8371da
http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=f1 2011 race hub&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=5083440815b601b8
Nice
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