SEO disaster, this is not feedback

[Mike Law]

Hi guys,

Love xenforo, hate my current google results.
We lost about 60% of our traffic, since about a week of moving over.

We have redirects, thanks to Kier, to redirect our vbseo traffic.

We went from roughly 50/60.000 uniques to 20.000 at the moment.

Please advise, tips and tools to remedy this,​

 

[Peggy]

I dont think anyone here puts any blame out, just stating the fact that we lost an amazing amount of traffic.
Its nice to see people defend something, but in this case there is no need for it. This thread was started to remedy, any possible way, the effect of migration traffic loss.

Just because we like this product does not mean we can not discuss the negative impact of certain aspects of migrating, whether it is vbul to xenf or xenf to vbul.

I didn't say we couldn't discuss it Mike, and I was not defending anything. I too was stating a fact.

I'm not sure that there is anything that can be done about the lost traffic, except to be patient. If there is something that can be done, I'm all ears (eyes).

 

[Markos]

I think there are a need of a article for this...i try to write something in the next days, but i need someone that corrects the errors of my bad english...

There are several issues that you can control with Google Webmaster Tools.

1) You have to see the number of indexed pages on your website/forum ( site:http://yoursite.com on Google); the majority of seo problems on migration are with the drop of indexed pages.

2) Control also the crawl rate on Google...you can set an higher level of crawling with the GWT: go to Site Configuration -> Site Settings -> Crawl rate. Warning: a level too high to request can increse the bandwith consumed and the server load...i suggest to try little increase if you are on a shared service.

3) On Diagnostics you can see if there are errors or problems ("Crawl errors") with your pages...and resolve.


4) I suggest you to use the Xenforo sitemap for a fast indexing of your pages. In alternative you can send with the GWT a sitemap with your rss...there are not a "general rss" of all your forums aivable; for now you have to send a rss sitemap by forum...and resend it every week/month.


5) There are simple tools like Seo Monitor that will inform you about the number of indexed pages. With this you can see if your seo problem is resolved in the majority of cases (increase of pages indexed: probably increase of visits) ...

 

[dutchbb]

I dont think anyone here puts any blame out, just stating the fact that we lost an amazing amount of traffic.
Its nice to see people defend something, but in this case there is no need for it. This thread was started to remedy, any possible way, the effect of migration traffic loss.

Just because we like this product does not mean we can not discuss the negative impact of certain aspects of migrating, whether it is vbul to xenf or xenf to vbul.

I didn't say we couldn't discuss it Mike, and I was not defending anything. I too was stating a fact.

I'm not sure that there is anything that can be done about the lost traffic, except to be patient. If there is something that can be done, I'm all ears (eyes).

The only thing I can think of that might help is sending a sitemap to Google on a regular basis.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

In particular the last two points are relevant in this case.

I saw there is already an add-on for it: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/sitemap-for-xenforo.9684/ . You may want to try that one Mike.

 

[Peggy]

Yep I have the sitemap, and I re-send it to google about every 2 weeks. Google is at my site every day, as are a couple of other spiders - yahoo and aws (amazon).

 

[Mike Law]

The only thing I can think of that might help is sending a sitemap to Google on a regular basis.

=I saw there is already an add-on for it: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/sitemap-for-xenforo.9684/ . You might want to try that one Mike.

Dude, thank you so much! this is the kind of thing I was hoping for with this thread!
Any other SEO stuff please post here!

 

[Brett Peters]

Dude, thank you so much! this is the kind of thing I was hoping for with this thread!
Any other SEO stuff please post here!

Dont know if this helps at all but I use http://twitterfeed.com/ to automatically post RSS Feeds to twitter and Facebook.
The reason is simple, Bots instantly follow links to your site.

 

[Mike Law]

Yeah we used that, but decided against it for the following reason

1) twitter is only useful if you have loads of followers
2) loads of followers will stop following you if you blast their accounts with new post every minute
2.1) google seems to not like link spamming
3) as such we now only manually tweet quality posts, which seems to work....

Thanks for the tip though!

 

[Brett Peters]

Shouldn't stop you from Feeding to an un followed (un official) account, After all I am not talking about needing or having followers but more the benefit of getting bots to your site when new content gets pushed to twitter/FB.

I look forward to watching this threads SEO suggestions.

 

[AzzidReign]

To bump an old topic, how has everything been coming along for the users that had a drop in unique visitors after converting. Has it picked back up? Did you do anything that really helped with getting indexed more/higher that wasn't specified in this thread?

 

[TheBigK]

Oh well. This is going to be quite important for me as well. Interested in knowing how does the traffic recover and after how long? Any special measures etc. We'd be converting our forum with over 500k uniques once the importer is in place

 

[Mike Law]

Hi,

I do see it bounce back recently, slowly. I will make a copy of the chart and post it in a bit.
No extra steps were taken,

Started xenforo in april, dropped down til September and bounces back slowly now.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Mike Law - make sure you give any feedback to KAM about what might have been the cause of the semi-sustained drop and how that might be mitigated.

Anyone know of some tools that can be deployed at launch to determine the cause of the traffic loss ?

Of Note: Google has been making many changes as well over the last 6 months.

 

[Mike Law]

Well as pointed out the key factors

1) software change
2) google needs time to re-index
3) Panda (google change)

It took longer than expected, but seems on the way up again


here is a screenie

 

[Digital Doctor]

When was Panda again ?

 

[Mike Law]

Google's Panda has received several updates since the original rollout in February 2011, and the effect went global in April 2011, which is exactly when I moved to Xenforo

 

[Deepmartini]

The price is temporary traffic drop is worth it! Consider it a "cost" of providing the best forum experience for your users. In time, you will have triple those numbers.

 

[lazer]

Glad to see that things are picking up for you again.

Being "pre" conversion (VB > XF), I would be interested to hear if this is the norm, following conversion?

 

[AzzidReign]

Most conversions (if not all) you'll see drops in organic traffic. You just need to take precautions like making sure your redirect script works right, adding a new sitemap to Google and Bing right away, and then just watching G Analytics (or w/e you use) and the Webmaster tools to see what errors there are so you can go in and fix them.

 

[lazer]

Yes, thanks, I know that - I was just asking for "real World" examples

 

[kkm323]

you'll gain more traffic if you wait little longer