Oh snaps! Digitalpoint switched over to Xenforo :D

[Digital Doctor]

Love Digitalpoint's Blog-Like News on the Home URL (www.digitalpoint.com).



Simple.
Can have a cute graphic to make things look pretty.
Paginated.
Titles are the perfect size.
a [Continue reading] link.
Very Wordpress Blog like. (which is a compliment).

The only thing I see that I would like would be Categories.

Great job.

Edit: Love being able to watch the video without leaving Digitalpoint.com

 

[digitalpoint]

The only thing I see that I would like would be Categories.

That just sounds like work to me... considering the whole system is 100% automated, that would just means a human being would have to go in and categorize stuff... booo... haha

 

[digitalpoint]

And how come Microsoft can't make Windows render things better? Looks so crappy in those screenshots, when I'm used to seeing it like this...

 

[Alpha1]

This alexa graph about digitalpoints forums is nothing short of scary:


http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forums.digitalpoint.com

@digitalpoint could you fill us in on this?

 

[HWS]

There is nothing scary with that. Alexa data is not very reliable and we also see traffic rank bouncing all the time.

This can also be caused by shifting pages to another subdomain.

But of course you see changes in statistical data if you change the softwre powering your site. What really counts for a business is the relation between work for the site and the money it earns.

 

[Alpha1]

Shawn explains it here: One Month After Switching From vBulletin To XenForo...

@digitalpoint could you post an update how your forums traffic statistics has evolved since the migration until now?

 

[TacticsUK]

More specifically how your Google traffic held up after the update. I have a forum I would like to migrate and my SEO head always swings me towards a clean URL structure where posts (or content of any type) can be categorised by the URL strucutre, as someone alluded to above. So your adsense forum would be of the structure /adsense/help-with-ctr-rate.html rather than it just being /threads/help-with-ctr-rate.456794 for example. I can see you have shown that Google spider rates have increased nicely but this is to be expected with a complete update of the all URLs on the site, but 7 months or whatever in from your platform change, are you pleased with the SEO results of Xenforo? Have you maintained positions for your best keyowords? Is Google traffic better, worse or the same as before you moved?

I know that it will be difficult to extract other Google factors (Panda, Penguin and a general dumbing down of forum results in the SERPs compared to last year) but any indication of your thoughts would be appreciated.

You can read more of what I am trying to get at here:
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...s-and-routes-and-imperfect-seo-options.63925/

My point is that my experience tells me that URL structure can play a big part in SEO and I am finding Xenforo not as flexible as I would like it to be and not as flexible as most other forum or CMS applications / frameworks. The blunt reply on the thread I posted is that this won't ever be looked at and this is an oversight IMHO.

 

[Adam Howard]

I would not classify Alexa.com as a proper rating system. I would call it a poor excuse for spam marketing. No one worth their salt or knows anything about anything, would ever depend on that site for any true rating of the sorts.

For a time, if you have the old alexa toolbar, you can even trick alexa.com into thinking you are a fraction of the population (the world, population). And thus honestly lie to alexa on how popular a site was to the point of gross negligence and absurdity.

They never did clear that old data and often you will find a site that looks like it's ranking fairly well at one time. When the real truth is it likely had no visitors and no one even knew it existed

 

[Wildcat Media]

Checking our big board, it gets a few stats correct, but others are highly skewed. For instance, it claims that we see far fewer users visiting from work than from home. Our own stats show the opposite: we are busiest Monday through Friday, during prime office hours spanning the east and west coasts of the US/Canada. Especially from 11am onward--seems like folks get settled in at work, and then start hitting the site a couple of hours later. This has been consistent since the day I took over as admin (maybe eight or nine years ago). Tapers off slightly around 8pm Eastern time (quittin' time on the west coast ), but still keeps going until about midnight.

 

[digitalpoint]

The biggest thing with Alexa is it's more or less a mediocre measurement of volume of low quality users. Alexa toolbar has an exponentially higher install base in countries like Malaysia, Pakistan, India, etc.

We started mitigating low quality users and preventing them from using our site, so indirectly low quality users being blocked from our site will correlate pretty well with a "worse" Alexa rating even if you have more (but higher quality) traffic.

https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/mitigation-of-low-quality-users.2628741/

https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/i-cant-post-in-buy-sell-trade.2606754/page-3#post-18419318

https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/i-cant-post-in-buy-sell-trade.2606754/page-3#post-18419342

 

[digitalpoint]

Also we were affected by a combo of Google changes...

Panda 2.0+

Google Hummingbird

Google authorship will not work on forums any longer (for example if your sub domain is "forums").

We don't rank as well for dumb things we had no business ranking for (for example we were #1 for "hottest girl in the world", yielding millions of views to that thread). But we rank better for things more relevant to our website (like programming questions).

The net result is we are getting about 5,000 less users from Google search per day, but the reality is that it's a good thing because the users we *do* get are better suited for our site and end up being repeat visitors/registering. And when it comes down to it, if you get ~115,000 Google search visitors per day, going to 110,000 (but higher quality/more relevant for your site) is actually a good thing.

We have gotten past the need for volume of traffic, and have been focusing a lot on quality > quantity the last year anyway.

 

[Chris Shortreed]

That just sounds like work to me... considering the whole system is 100% automated, that would just means a human being would have to go in and categorize stuff... booo... haha

How did you set it up so its 100% automated ?

 

[digitalpoint]

How did you set it up so its 100% automated ?

Not sure what you mean... Was just programmed that way.

 

[Chris Shortreed]

but its nothing that is apart of xenforo, the blogging homepage correct ?

 

[digitalpoint]

but its nothing that is apart of xenforo, the blogging homepage correct ?

I don't have any sort of blog... If you are referring to this: https://www.digitalpoint.com/

No, it's nothing to do with XenForo.

 

[surfsup]

Also we were affected by a combo of Google changes...

Panda 2.0+

Google Hummingbird

Google authorship will not work on forums any longer (for example if your sub domain is "forums").

We don't rank as well for dumb things we had no business ranking for (for example we were #1 for "hottest girl in the world", yielding millions of views to that thread). But we rank better for things more relevant to our website (like programming questions).

The net result is we are getting about 5,000 less users from Google search per day, but the reality is that it's a good thing because the users we *do* get are better suited for our site and end up being repeat visitors/registering. And when it comes down to it, if you get ~115,000 Google search visitors per day, going to 110,000 (but higher quality/more relevant for your site) is actually a good thing.

We have gotten past the need for volume of traffic, and have been focusing a lot on quality > quantity the last year anyway.

We were hit as well, losing about $200-500/month from adsense too which sucks. Our post count is still the same, we have been averaging 100k posts every 4-5 months for the past year n half which I am happy about as the activity is there with quality posts for our forum.

When you stated this: Google authorship will not work on forums any longer (for example if your sub domain is "forums"). - Does this mean that authorship could work with my domain since the forum is in root?

 

[digitalpoint]

We were hit as well, losing about $200-500/month from adsense too which sucks. Our post count is still the same, we have been averaging 100k posts every 4-5 months for the past year n half which I am happy about as the activity is there with quality posts for our forum.

When you stated this: Google authorship will not work on forums any longer (for example if your sub domain is "forums"). - Does this mean that authorship could work with my domain since the forum is in root?

It could, but it's never a guarantee... Google won't show authorship if it doesn't feel it's appropriate.