New move to XF - SEO intitial report, etc.

craigiri

Well-known member
We moved a million posts to XF from our old system last week - up and running by Thursday evening.

For those worried about SEO, I have the following to report...less than one week later, we are largely whole. Google appears to have the site and all the posts re-indexed....and we have redirects in case they don't (and for external sites with links to our forums).

Note that the new url is hearth.com/talk - and see the enclosed screens. Google has the main site as well as the forum rooms in fine order.

Also, our site traffic (page views) returned to normal within 3 days. Since we had the old forum set to read-only for a day of that, it is quite impressive.

I will report further when there is more data to share. Screen shot 2012-03-21 at 12.05.50 PM.webpScreen shot 2012-03-21 at 12.05.35 PM.webp
 
Not sure how important it is but after switching to Xenforo not quite a year ago my past months Search Traffic was 53.81%
 
craigiri may I ask what forum software did you use previous to this?

Expression Engine - a CMS with a forum module....used it since 2002 (formerly called pmachine)
It also had good SEO....because it was laid out in a relatively simple fashion.
 
Your forum looks great !
If the old geezers on your site coped well with the transition .... I think you (and Xenforo) deserve a medal (and a trophy!).
I liked your forum discussion here:
http://www.hearth.com/talk/forums/new-forum-discussions-and-questions.9/

Jake Bunce deserves the medal....
:)
All hail.....

Along the way, we (he....with some input from me) got all the bugs out of the old importer....which was not doing things right. We even imported passwords......two steps....EE -> VB -> XF.

Jake took notes so hopefully any other EE transitions will be easier....

The geezers on our forums probably average about 35-40 years old, so it is certainly not the teen and early 20's crowd. The mods and admins, though, average closer to 60.

Heck, DD, who did you think invented the internet before you were born? My good buddies started arguably the very first real forums (The Well). Before that, we started communes and hung out on ham radio and pirate CB channels.
 
The sexy xenforo forums really make the rest of your site EVEN MORE retro.
Does the xenforo login connect to the gallery or anything else ?
 
XF login connects to nothing yet - but the old system is still up and running for the CMS and articles...so those are still expression engine. The old logins still work for the few things that are user-editable.

All the articles are in EE. Same with the QA and the fuel price guide and wiki.
 
Top Bottom