Sometimes I think I was way better with vB 3x + vBSEO

[Adam Howard]

Okay, I think I'll first put the things on a timeline.

1 December 2012: We shift from vB+vBSEO to Xenforo. Traffic goes down ~50%; as you see in the graph. Traffic continues to show 'some' improvement over the next few months.

28 Aug - 4 September 2012: Javascript error on the site makes 'google bot' discover several thousand (~34k) virtual URLs which end on 404 pages. Our traffic experiences another 50% drop. I continue to investigate the issue and by the end of September 2012; I setup proper redirects to all phantom URLs to correct pages. GWT then starts dropping the count.

December 28, 2012: The error count reported in GWT is zero and the site is absolutely clean. There'd be a few normal, natural 404s because of the threads we deleted.


So the errors were only discovered by GoogleBot; not by humans. Google said it won't hurt website; but in our case, it did. That's another problem though.

The fact remains that our traffic didn't see improvement or recovery prior to August 2012.

You said it yourself....

Google found all those 404 pages. So your ranking would do down and take 3 months to start to recover.

So it finally removed those errors December 28, 2012 .... Correct? OK, now add 3 months .... Don't expect any improvement in your ranking or traffic until March 28, 2013 (which is 3 months after the errors were finally zero).

But take into account you also have site errors, this very moment. How long were those errors on your site? Once you correct them add in more time for Google to recalculate.

None of this is the fault of XenForo, but rather the error between user and keyboard.

 

[TheBigK]

The errors haven't been with the site for long. I had updated the ad-code about 4 months back for an advertiser. I was earlier told that we'd recover in 6 months; looks like I'll now have to wait another 3 months.

PS: Could you check if the error you found has gone? I really doubt that error'd be affecting our rank.

 

[Adam Howard]

Another reason: Our members aren't native English speakers. But that has been the case since long time. There are a few threads that have really great content and they'd bring most of the traffic to the website. I'm not sure how'd I ask my members to write in-depth content or ask questions that'd classify as 'good content'. Plus I see that more crappy sites are outranking us for the discussions we should 'obviously' rank well for.

English has nothing to do with it. Some of the highest rated sites don't speak a word of English.

What have you done, yourself, to add content? Have you wrote out any well thought out post?

 

[TheBigK]

English has nothing to do with it. Some of the highest rated sites don't speak a word of English.

What have you done, yourself, to add content? Have you wrote out any well thought out post?

I continue to write posts and they rank well. So do several of our members. If writing content is the thing - we continue to do so. I however wonder if there's anything else we should really look at.

 

[Adam Howard]

The errors haven't been with the site for long. I had updated the ad-code about 4 months back for an advertiser. I was earlier told that we'd recover in 6 months; looks like I'll now have to wait another 3 months.

PS: Could you check if the error you found has gone? I really doubt that error'd be affecting our rank.

Errors are gone.

You'll start recovering once you're established as stable, error free, depth content, and of course as traffic (usage) goes up. Some of that you'll need to work on before Google does anything.

SEO rating is a lot like credit. Easy to trash and harder to recover from.

I'd go over with what you have in your htaccess and rebots.txt in your wordpress install. Double check what you have installed in WordPress as well. Check what add-ons you have for XenForo and see how sites record those add-ons (if they do and if they should).

Remember recovery will only start after you're done.

 

[Adam Howard]

I continue to write posts and they rank well. So do several of our members. If writing content is the thing - we continue to do so. I however wonder if there's anything else we should really look at.

Word of mouth.

Let people know you're there. Assume you're starting over. (Yes, changing your path can really have that much impact).

So if you site was /forums/ and now it is /community/ ..... Place as much effort into it as you did when you first opened up as /forums/

 

[TheBigK]

May I start a conversation with you? I'm not quite comfortable posting htaccess contents here. Robots.txt is of course up there for review.

 

[Adam Howard]

May I start a conversation with you? I'm not quite comfortable posting htaccess contents here. Robots.txt is of course up there for review.

Sure.

Although I'm not sure how much help I could be in regard to WordPress with XenForo. I personally have seen WordPress draw traffic away from forums (phpBB, vBulletin, IPB, BB, and even XenForo). It's not something I've completely mastered myself.

WordPress just adds more into the factor.

 

[TheBigK]

The traffic comes to WorPress and XF separately. It's actually two different sites working on the same domain; that have a matching look.

 

[Adam Howard]

The traffic comes to WorPress and XF separately. It's actually two different sites working on the same domain; that have a matching look.

http://www.crazyengineers.com/
http://www.crazyengineers.com/community

1 site, but 2 paths. This is how Google will see it. This is also how your visitors will see it (forum is extension of the site).

DigitalPoint will tell you that's a good thing. And he would be right. It's wonderful to have something "around" your community and not have the community at the center, per say.

I personally though tried having WordPress with my forum 4x (phpBB, IPB, vB, XF) and all 4 times things did not turn out well for me. It can be done, but I will admit I lack that skill.

 

[CTXMedia]

Just out of interest, what do the XF ACP stats tell you?

If you do post / thread / active users / registrations for the past two years - what do those graphs look like?

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Chris D]

As Jake says, page views themselves are not the best metric with XenForo. They will go down compared to other software. Think about older versions of vBulletin. After posting even using the quick reply box, you'd be taken to a success page first. That is +1 page view.

With XenForo, you don't get that. And that's true of many other actions. Page views will absolutely go down. And they did according to your graph starting from December 2011.

Did advertising revenue go down? Did it come back up at any point?

Your traffic seems to increase over the early part of 2012 and level out. So far I am not worried about this graph... until we get to August/September.

I imagine too that this is your main area of concern.

But XenForo cannot be responsible for this.If it was we'd be hearing this from the hundreds of sites who also made the change at the same time (including us). Our page rank was completely wiped out when we moved, but we also changed our domain name and lost some content we had on WordPress. It went right down from 4 to 0. But within six months we were back up to 4 again. We have not experienced the same as you. Maybe we have seen page views drop but again, this is predictable.

This means the issues must be something else. And this is the most likely cause:

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Exactly the same time as your numbers dropped, Google made a number of fundamental changes to its algorithm. This is absolutely going to cause some sites problems. And it has done. It's well publicised and I believe you've had this pointed out to you before. From what I can see the changes in Google's algorithms and data can be the only cause of your problems.

But, sadly, there probably isn't a solution. You could try contacting Google but I'm not sure they have people that can discuss specifics relating to a domain's search visibility.

 

[TheBigK]

Just out of interest, what do the XF ACP stats tell you?

If you do post / thread / active users / registrations for the past two years - what do those graphs look like?

Cheers,
Shaun

It's looks mostly the same. The traffic declined but user interaction went up; so the traph looks like two identical hills in 2011 and 2012.

@Chris: I'm of course not complaining against XF. I AM a die-hard fan of this software and have recommended it to several people who're looking to start community online. I absolutely have no doubts with XF's SEO capabilities either. My concern is all about the goodness of xenforo not working for us.

I'm not bothered about pageviews; though the direct advertisers care about it a lot. My bigger concern is that the overall traffic going down for the entire website. Our PR went down to '0' and then got back to 5; but SERPs aren't the same as they used to be - that's bothering me.

I've been following Panda / Penguin and other algos for a long time and can say that we aren't affected by those. Our 'real' traffic drop happened in the first week of September (Date 4 & 5) when the 404 error count shot to over 34k and then to 99k in the next few days. But that comes much later in the picture; as the traffic never reached to our earlier numbers even before the 404 disaster.

There's of course no point in contacting Google. I've been experiencing exactly the opposite of what Google's been communicating in public. I think I'll just wait and watch - which is the hardest thing to do; unfortunately.

 

[CTXMedia]

You've got 340,000+ index pages in Google for "www.crazyengineers.com/community/" but I notice your board title is: CrazyEngineers

Did you use the exact same title you'd used previously with vB? (I suspect you used "CrazyEngineers Forum" after visiting an old snapshot in the WayBack Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20100103010002/http://www.crazyengineers.com/forum)

Could it be as simple as you dropping the word "forum" from your title that has caused the change in visitors from Google?

To my mind you need to use something like the following for your title: Crazy Engineers Forum

Separate the words "crazy" and "engineers" and add "forum" so that these are included in every indexed page Google has for your site as individual words; in particular the splitting of "engineers" from the "crazy" would hopefully bring more hits for the words "engineer" and "engineers".

Just something to consider.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[TheBigK]

Well, 'CrazyEngineers' is our registered trademark and it has to be one word. Yes, we did have 'Forum' in the title first; but I don't want to change it now. It's already there for over a year now. The 'brand' searches are just a few percent of the overall search traffic to our website. Plus, the name is a known name in my country; so I'd not mess with it at this stage.

I'm not sure if God's watching this thread - but I see some real improvement in traffic today

 

[CTXMedia]

Well, 'CrazyEngineers' is our registered trademark and it has to be one word. Yes, we did have 'Forum' in the title first; but I don't want to change it now. It's already there for over a year now. The 'brand' searches are just a few percent of the overall search traffic to our website. Plus, the name is a known name in my country; so I'd not mess with it at this stage.

Okay, fair enough, but I don't understand - I thought this whole thread was about getting your forums back to their previous (higher) traffic levels?

 

[TheBigK]

Okay, fair enough, but I don't understand - I thought this whole thread was about getting your forums back to their previous (higher) traffic levels?

Yes, it is. All I'm saying is that 'forums' or 'crazyengineers forum' or 'crazy engineers forums' terms didn't bring much traffic. In fact, if you search for crazy engineers; we'd pop at #1.

Did I read you right? I might just be a bit out of my mind today.

 

[Luke F]

Yes, it is. All I'm saying is that 'forums' or 'crazyengineers forum' or 'crazy engineers forums' terms didn't bring much traffic. In fact, if you search for crazy engineers; we'd pop at #1.

Did I read you right? I might just be a bit out of my mind today.

'engineer forum' seems pretty fundamental

having a space and including 'forums' would probably rank you higher for that

 

[TheBigK]

We are #2 for 'engineer forum' and #1 for 'engineers forum'. Just checked.

 

[HWS]

Switching from vB 3.8 will almost always result in less page views.

vB 3.8 included what was called the "archive". This was just a very stripped down version of the forum content. But Google preferred to index that "archive" over the regular pages and thus most visitors arriving from Google were directed to the "Archive" pages.

Switching to XenForo removes that "Archive" resulting in a loss of many Google links. If you seriously switch from vB 3.8 to XF you have to take care about correct redirection scripts including all "archive" pages.