Ranking off a cliff after 2.3.4 -> 2.3.6; Google update; or what?

I began noticing Google is de-ranking my content, and such.

Heck, even YouTube has de-ranked my content over time.

The Internet is truly turning into bots on bots on bots.

Ah well.. it was the eventual outcome we knew this was always coming. There is no more 'free Internet,' especially in these trying economical uncertain times.

Ads overlords are winning, those controlling the puppet strings of search engines push themselves (think GET CHROME INSTALLED NOW), and so on. This spells disaster for communities that are existing forums, and even more-so for new forums.

The life of a forum used to be relatively simple. You picked a niche. You installed your forum CMS of choice. Then you began making quality content to circulate about.

Those days are dead, a few searches around and you will see this fairly confirmed.

The forums that have outdid themselves were warez/piracy/hacks-breaches/etc. These niched forums obviously were not legitimate in their operations but were high profit from the handful of founders I learned of. The eventual outcome for them would be getting forcibly shutdown too.

Nowadays you can have a sweet little forum. Then people are copying/pasting your content off and away to places like Facebook/Twitter (X)/Reddit which all have way higher SEO-rankings than our forums and bury our forum links in search results.. heck I have even found scrapers stealing my posts to other bot-created-forums.

tl;dr dead Internet theory is among us and we're d00med
 
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The SEO problem is in XenForo, not in Google! Try it out of curiosity like me with a few different forum systems, and in the end you will see for yourself that the problem is in XenForo! A nice system, but now with a very bad problem that you understand about after you have paid $234 unfortunately. I am disappointed because before that it was the best forum system. What is even worse is that the owners clearly don't care either. Months after reporting and discussing this problem, there is no reaction from their side. Stay safe and healthy! I use the free Discourse and I am super happy!
 
Milen said:
The SEO problem is in XenForo, not in Google! Try it out of curiosity like me with a few different forum systems, and in the end you will see for yourself that the problem is in XenForo! A nice system, but now with a very bad problem that you understand about after you have paid $234 unfortunately. I am disappointed because before that it was the best forum system. What is even worse is that the owners clearly don't care either. Months after reporting and discussing this problem, there is no reaction from their side. Stay safe and healthy! I use the free Discourse and I am super happy!
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You literally have no idea what you're talking about.
 
Milen said:
The SEO problem is in XenForo, not in Google! Try it out of curiosity like me with a few different forum systems, and in the end you will see for yourself that the problem is in XenForo! A nice system, but now with a very bad problem that you understand about after you have paid $234 unfortunately. I am disappointed because before that it was the best forum system. What is even worse is that the owners clearly don't care either. Months after reporting and discussing this problem, there is no reaction from their side. Stay safe and healthy! I use the free Discourse and I am super happy!
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Ember js is the clunkiest of flaming garbage cans to surface this blue water and land ball.

If you are using other 'free' forums that you are believing to be faring well in regards to SEO, do you mind giving us a keyword search that lands your site? I would give you mine, as I am front-top-page for many on Google using XenForo, however, this has been changing irregardless of me changing forum versions.

Someone commented this, and it is correct:
www.searchenginejournal.com

Google Algorithm Updates & Changes: A Complete History

Learn about the biggest and most important Google search algorithm launches, updates, and refreshes of all time – from 2003 to today.
www.searchenginejournal.com www.searchenginejournal.com

XenForo devs cannot predict/guess Google's latest SEO algos. It's impossible.

What happened is the past month, Google modified their search engine results. Several things are taken into account. Google can do whatever they want pretty much.. sadly.

This highly likely is Google's try at curbing LLMs, and other AI bots spewing out content/material across many forums, blogs, etc. In crossfire, Google is hitting many legitimate websites/people.

This is not XenForo's fault. They didn't destroy SEO with a patch. If they did, show us SEO scan scores between versions.
 
Another thing I'd like to mention, Google is beginning to punish/penalize websites which make use of AI/LLM for content-creation.

As an example I could type into an LLM, "Explain why XenForo SEO is down for Google in April 2025 - make it very concise?"
XenForo-based forums have experienced a decline in Google SEO performance in April 2025 due to several factors:


  1. Google Algorithm Updates: The March 2024 core update, which integrated the Helpful Content Update, targeted unhelpful content, affecting forums with low-quality or duplicate posts. XenForo+1XenForo+1
  2. AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated summaries now dominate search results, reducing click-through rates for organic listings. Funnel Simplified+1Webmaster World+1
  3. Forum Platform Challenges: Technical issues, such as improper redirects and slow page load speeds, have hindered proper indexing and user engagement. XenForo

These combined factors have led to decreased visibility and traffic for XenForo forums on Google.
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Now this information is quite spot-on, but merely me providing this content could potentially SEO derank this forum.
It would in reality likely take many/several more AI/LLM posts, but you get the concept.
A community could have ~4 users posting a bunch of AI/LLM content and Google could punish the entire website - if that is a lot of the content.
Google's reasoning for doing this is they believe they are shutting down clickbait content, which is especially generated using AI/LLM content.

What is crazy to me about this is that they are obviously only hitting the majority/common AI, whereas others have better content generation that is more human-like, with lower AI detection rates. Okay, I will shuddup shortly. cough cough again, dead Internet theory.

Google has no interest in people landing on your forum nor any website you run. Because your forum is not guaranteed to bring them ad-revenue. Being on YouTube, and Google will do it though. So like mentioned above, by the LLM - the age of Internet forums is kinda stagnating. Search engines used to basically give away 'free leads,' through said forum showing up top in results. With these latest trends in SEO minimizing normal websites - either invest in advertising or grow a massive social media gathering across the major ones.. and funnel people back to your forum. :/

Not sure this is helpful, but I hope so
 
Austin Bollinger said:
A community could have ~4 users posting a bunch of AI/LLM content and Google could punish the entire website - if that is a lot of the content.
Google's reasoning for doing this is they believe they are shutting down clickbait content, which is especially generated using AI/LLM content.
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I'm not going to spend any more money just to prove you wrong!

Now​

I am not waging war against Xenforo and its creators, so as not to get into deep disputes. We all know that this system before 2.3 was not just the best, but the perfect forum system. I myself have mentioned that until version 2.2.17 there was no problem with indexing by Google. I spent a lot of money to confirm it for myself, and to be sure that the problem is not in the server, not in the content of the forum, but in the forum system itself. I also conducted tests with other free forum systems with different articles (which were not written by me, but by AI), and Google indexed them on the seventh day after their publication. It is clear that there will always be someone who will not agree with my opinion for some reason of their own. But in disputes like "Which came first, the chicken or the egg", I will not participate. Everyone will see for themselves, because as I have said "You can put new eyes on a blind man, and he will still not see if he does not want to."

Assumptions​

The creators of Xenforo will release a new SEO addon of theirs which will of course fix the "unintentional" mistake they made with version 2.3.
The new XenForo 2.4 will have SEO settings that will fix the error that was made with version 2.3.
I hope I'm wrong!
I wish you many users and positive development of the forums. Let us be human, let us be healthy and alive. Everything else can go to hell. :)
 
I don’t know what’s up with people thinking we’d deliberately sabotage our own customers to make a quick buck lately, but we haven’t wittingly made any changes that would negatively impact SEO in XF 2.3 (or any other release for that matter). In fact, we’ve done our best to keep up on virtually all best practices out of the box (albeit with a few edge cases, but they’re nothing major or recent).

We can only speculate like anybody, but it's likely any fluctuations are due to Google ranking changes. Our own metrics from Search Console aren't showing any massive swings either.
 
frm said:
1741325875773.webp


Bing seems to indicate it's more than just Google, but there's not enough data there to say for certain.

1741325975284.webp
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Here's an update for Google.

I've only recently done link building by a freelancer, and it has yet to be delivered, to see if I can get out of this slump.

As shown in the first image of the OP, it fell off around 2/7, and as seen below, it has yet to recover any ground.

1745375549125.webp

No real effect from Bing.

1745375605286.webp
 
frm said:
Here's an update for Google.

I've only recently done link building by a freelancer, and it has yet to be delivered, to see if I can get out of this slump.

As shown in the first image of the OP, it fell off around 2/7, and as seen below, it has yet to recover any ground.

View attachment 321738

No real effect from Bing.

View attachment 321739
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Without a vertical scale it's hard to tell what is going on here. Are we looking at 10s, 100s, 1000s, or 10000s worth of daily impressions. If it's 10s or 100s these fluctuations are not that unusual. Google is quick to make drastic moves on sites with low overall click through conversions.

Like this image you placed in the first thread post...
frm said:
View attachment 319844
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This strongly indicates the impressions are likely very low (10s or 100s daily), and the total clicks are nearly zero for most days - this trend goes back into last December.

Yes, there is no doubt a change that occurred in early February, but that could be related to Google lowing your site rank due to a continually low click through rate.

To get a better picture you need to use Google Analytics and check Search Console Queries. You can then see what search terms you were getting the most impressions and clicks on before the first week in Feb. You can then take those same queries (search terms) place them into google search and see who exactly your site competitors are and how many out rank for searches you use to get impressions and clicks on.
 

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Milen said:
spend any more money
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There’s no need to spend money. It takes seconds or minutes tops to provision any forum software typically. Like maybe if you’re a day trader making $2,000,000 hourly sure okay I get you.

But I don’t think so lol

I’ll run a series of SEO tests between the forum versions. And I’ll keep a snapshot, ready to revert because I’d rather lose posts for some days than SEO.
 
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