XF 1.5 SEO Poor After Move to xenForo from IPB - Help

[David Bott]

Hi All...

Ok, well, I moved DBSTalk.com and TiVoCommunity.com from IPB to xenForo back in November and from that time I have seen my traffic drop off a good deal. I can only think that it is SEO related as IPB seemed to do a very good job and we were ranked very, very well.

Both these sites have been around a long time....We are talking 2002 time frame! So needless to say, they have been in Googles head for a long time.

So I am seeking help to get back on track. From what I can see in Webmaster Tools both site index are working just fine and I have few errors.

Please kindly help/advise as this move to xenForo has been great in regards to software, but this move has really hurt traffic.

Thank you.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

All redirects from your old site are working correctly?
I recently migrated two old forums into xf. My rankings in search engines didn't suffer at all.

 

[David Bott]

Yes, we verified a lot of link just to be sure when we did the move, all pulled up as expected. No reports in Google Webmaster Tools of missing pages, thus again it seem to be working. But the traffic you can just see drop off over time after the upgrade as referrers by search engine has dropped.

I have been building communities from 1995...this is the first time I have seen something like this and it seems to point to SEO in after the move.

 

[TPerry]

What version of IPB (since you say IPB I'm assuming the 3.x line? as the new is actually now IPS).
And this (the lower "traffic" if referring to page views) has been observed when converting from vB to XF. It has to do with the more extensive use of ajax with XF from what I remember being said if looking at the page views statistics. Each action on vB caused a new page load or similar and with XF that does not occur.

And some may be due to changes in Google itself.

 

[David Bott]

Yes, the 3X line of IPB.

This is with Google searching, not page view traffic, as I am looking at the search results. So if the search results took a hit, that surely affects page views which is what had me start looking.

And yes, some surely could be due to Google itself and changes they may make. However that also means that the software needs to evolve with it. This move to xenForo, while I like it, has surely hurt in traffic and thus income. And this comes from a guy that worked with the founds of xenFono when they were working with Vb when it was young. So I surely was excited to move to this platform. But this just hurts.

I am not sure if it is the meta data or what that is not right that Google no longer likes thus the poor searches.