Queries about vB to xF conversation and it's impact on SEO

[Khaleal]

Hello!

I am the owner of a vBulletin4 forum (classic) with about 30k of threads and 300k of posts.
After the rubbish that IB lately introduced (vBulletin5) I'd say that I will never upgrade! And because they have no reason to continue the development on vBulletin4 I would seriously look for alternatives.
Lets be honest! Both xenForo and IPB are better than vBulletin! They offer some great futures that vBulletin doesn't offer with great performance over vBulletin.
I started to test out IPB, it looks cool and funny and provides a wide range of add-ons and skins that beat xF's ones (even their default style is usable for a professional forum unlike xF's)! their pricing is a bit more expensive than xF (the basic fees) while the renewal fees are the double! Anyway, the pricing isn't an issue for me.
After that, I started to test out xF, the first thing I've noticed is the performance, in fact, it's incredibly fast! I liked the alerts function and how PMs are being displayed. something bad to mention about xF is it's skin structure. it's very basic and not professional, and the professional skins made by 3rd parties are quit few and can't be compared to those for IPB!
That was a small review and compensation between IPB and xF. Lets now go to the real subject
The real problem of the conversation (to xF or to IPB) is that about 92% from my visitors come from search engines! so, SEO is the most important side for me! especially that I got the first results with many good keywords which took me a very long time to get.
I've seen some reviews about converting vBs to IPB and most of the writers mentioned that they noticed a huge drop in their search engines traffic. that's why I came here to xenForo and not to IPB.
My question is, what is going to happen with my daily 30k+ of unique visitors?! and what will happen to my rankings with the good keywords mentioned above? I have a huge number of threads with PR4+ what will happen with them?
But please, before you reply, I don't need a "calm down xF SEO is good" replies! I would like to see real stories about conversations from vB to xF and it's impact on their traffic. it would be good if the stories are provided with traffic reports showing the month when the forum was converted.
BTW, I've used vBulletin without vBSEO and have the standard URLs (forumdisplay.php and showthread.php URLs)

A quick additional question: Does xF provide a converter from vBulletin 4.1.11 to the latest xenForo release?

I am so sorry for the very long thread, but I am really concerned about my forum's future after the conversation.
Thanks in advance to those members will reply with their stories (and even for who won't ) and I am also sorry for any English mistakes, I am not a native speaker

 

[Anthony Parsons]

We converted from vB4+vBSEO in December last year and the traffic is yet to cross the levels it got earlier. The pageviews are down (maybe because XF uses lot of AJAX) and as a result our income from advertisements has gone down too. I'm not quite sure how long will it take to recover it completely.

Changing one software to another has little to do with URL's. That is a small part... you are literally changing the entire pages code, thus you are actually delivering Google a brand new page. Change to IPB, XF, PHPBB, it doesn't matter... pick your poison, the same result will occur due to each softwares coded differences.

You would need to make the page design identical to see zero difference, which would mean sacrificing a lot of improvements your site will benefit from after the 12 month period where Google doesn't love you as much because you changed software. That second year you will see a massive difference.

You should instantly see a huge difference with users interaction, time on site, etc. Mine went up immediately, even though visitors and page views went down, taking 12 months to recover fully due to changing software.

You can screw this up without changing software, just make a significant style change and deliver the pages content to Google in a vastly different order, and watch the love get smacked by Google for doing so.

 

[TheBigK]

You should instantly see a huge difference with users interaction, time on site, etc. Mine went up immediately, even though visitors and page views went down, taking 12 months to recover fully due to changing software.

You can screw this up without changing software, just make a significant style change and deliver the pages content to Google in a vastly different order, and watch the love get smacked by Google for doing so.

Well, existing users love the site and they've been posting more, commenting more. But the pageviews required for the ads are down . We've been on the steady incline and will complete 1 year on XF on December 1. In the mean time, do you think it's the addition of sidebar to all our pages is causing the big problem: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...week-down-40-am-i-doing-anything-wrong.36373/ ?

 

[Khaleal]

Well, existing users love the site and they've been posting more, commenting more. But the pageviews required for the ads are down . We've been on the steady incline and will complete 1 year on XF on December 1. In the mean time, do you think it's the addition of sidebar to all our pages is causing the big problem: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...week-down-40-am-i-doing-anything-wrong.36373/ ?

I've replied in your thread, hope this will help
BTW, the page views drop in my opinion isn't caused because of Ajax usage, Ajax only affects the page-views of the members profiles.. the page views drop is caused by the Alerts System.. members spend less time checking for new replies or threads with such future.. They login, check if there are new alerts, and go without surfing the forum

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Ajax only affects the page-views of the members profiles.. the page views drop is caused by the Alerts System.. members spend less time checking for new replies or threads with such future.. They login, check if there are new alerts, and go without surfing the forum

Incorrect.

In VB when you post a reply, it has to reload the page. Another view. That is for every reply. XF, is all AJAX. Also with editing posts, all AJAX. VB & IPB, load another page.

Also, users don't check their alerts and dash, far from it actually. Since changing to XF user site time has gone up, not down. They stay on posting in new content, searching for relevant topics, and basically posting more in order to get more alerts.

Your logic is far from what occurs on XF software.

In the mean time, do you think it's the addition of sidebar to all our pages is causing the big problem: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...week-down-40-am-i-doing-anything-wrong.36373/ ?

What are the tags you removed, for starters, that you felt are useless yet may serve significant purpose. "I removed a large number of useless tags [ about 10k of them, I guess ]." Are you talking about HTML or tags as in, xentag addon or such?

Yes, adding a sidebar to every page, especially content pages, thus dilutes the quality of the content pages themselves. Saying that, if the sidebar is correctly nested within side html, then Google will know to discard it and only take what is between your main article code.

1. I updated my Robots.txt from allow everything to: http://www.crazyengineers.com/robots.txt
2. I had added widget framework sidebar to all the pages of the site in the last week of August 2012.

Your best effort to improve with XF is to not try and SEO it to some older standards. Don't worry about sitemaps and all that nonsense... XF truly does not need them. When you do things like that, you also tell Google that you're actively trying to manipulate their rankings. You play with a double edged sword using Google webmaster tools or such.
Every single time you make a significant change to your pages source, you tempt fate with Google. If you change enough, Google may determine your pages as new, thus quality and time scores are restarted. Basically those pages have to earn trust again on their own.

 

[TheBigK]

@Anthony Parsons: Yes, you're talking about my biggest fear that addition of sidebar might have been the problem. But we introduced it only to improve the overall user experience - both for guests and for our logged in members. I did think that it'd make the content / code ratio go down. If that's true, I think it's just matter of time that we'll see traffic being restored.

Though I know a few things about SEO, I never tried to 'optimise' anything. XF works fine out of the box. I'll keep everyone updated through another thread I started to discuss the issue. Thanks a ton for your response .