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

Not showing signature to guests is a good idea; and it does eliminate some noise from your pages. Yes, Google's been doing several changes to their algorithm; and I think it's better to continue building the community in such a way that it's less dependent on Google.

We've already began taking steps in that direction.
 
Other than checking for any major issues with Webmaster Tools, I pay absolutely no attention to SEO, and not all that much to searches about the forum (The most is to see if we've overtaken our old home, and to see if people are re-posting our work which happens often). Anything more is a waste of time, and and could be better spent on focusing on fine-tuning the site itself.

Rather than focus on SEO, I focus on the user experience, and on ways to promote content (staff and user generated) as those are the only things that truly matter. Right now I'm working on cleaning up our style, and am going to start making it responsive while at the same time cutting down on useless portions of the forum, and building up functionality. I'm also starting to brainstorm ways to gamify the forum, as it'll appeal to the user base, and is something that will directly influence content creation.
 
I still have a site on vb3.8x and can share that while advertising revenue and post count has increased, page views are still wavering around the same levels they were at 18 months ago.

Since I'm technically "on my own" there have been many changes to the vb templates to weed-out unnecessary HTML code and CSS styling. The site runs vbseo and is supported by Cloudflare, in a configuration that probably would create some debate ;) Other features like Quick-Reply and Acknowledgements have been disabled over the last 18 months, and don't display content that isn't viable to guest users (search engines).

The point is that Xenforo is an excellent platform, but I find myself doing a bit of the same thing with my smaller XF site. That being said, I do find that users aren't as accustomed to the look of Xenforo compared to a competing site that runs Kunena, and have considered using an XF Theme that looks more "vb".
 
TheBigK said:
Hmm; those were from the direct advertisers we served via DFP. I'll fix that asap. Our site suffered a ton of 404 errors; which Google said won't affect your rank. The PageRank itself is intact; but we have not had same SERPs.
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Hello The BigK,

where did you read the a lot of 404 errors doesn't affect your rank on Google?

It's false. It is one of the main problems that can cause a penalty of a site and should be corrected soon. More 404 more errors you have, more strong may be the penalty. I have personal experience regarding this.

Your graphic show that you had already problems before to install Xenforo. If than, you had again more 404 errors when you switched from vB to Xenforo probably your site have been penalized from Google for that.

Block your 404 erros page from Robots.txt or 301 redirect all 404 pages to your home pages, soon.

Regarding Wordpress/Xenforo question, I don't think that it a problem. I use Wordpress from many years, and it is the best CMS software that I know. With a good optimization and a nice SEO theme, it can become the best portal for each site. I used it also with vBulletin in the past and I always had great results.

Good luck for your community,
Regards
 
Evina said:
Interested on this.
You mean like private stuff/discussion, off topic, game forums?
This way, it may help page rank?
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Some content, such as all of the users presently online, does help attract users - but it isn't necessarily associated to the subject of a particular page. I still display it, but not who has been online in a number of previous hours. I also don't display the vb forum posting rules to guest users, they don't need to see it because they aren't registered yet o_O and it is just a bunch of HTML that is all too common in many forum pages - it is best to display what is unique about your site. The same goes for poll data, redundant birthdays, excessive statistics blocks, and some degree of DHTML/Javascript - I want it out of the way for guest users and search engines.

I'm considering removing the display-options and moderator info (that display below a thread list) to guest users as well, because showing who the moderator is of a forum isn't relevant to a forum's subject.

Conversely, I display a right-side "Tags" block to guest users - but not to registered users - on the home page. Tags are great for search engines, but are a mild nuisance to registered users; they want to see all of the near-real-time stuff, not have a tag list forced down on them.

So when guest users browse that particular site, it does work a bit faster than it does when the user registers and logs in, but at that point they are contributing and gaining the experience they seek when browsing the guest-only version - which is reduced down to just forums, threads, and posts.

Hope this helps,
 
TheBigK said:
I love XenForo; but the fact is that after converting to Xenforo; our traffic sank and it never came back. I was looking at the analytics data and it makes me feel really bad. We used to draw so many visitors and the user registration rate was all time high. But we converted to Xenforo in December of 2011; and things haven't improved - except for the regular members loving it.

...but they loved the old forums as well!

After converting; I prepared myself for a 6 month dip in traffic. But the fact is that it never recovered fully. In August last year; we went closer to 80% our traffic just for a few days before the Google disaster that reduced our traffic to almost 1/5th of what it was during our vB days.

I never imagined myself writing this post. I'm a supporter of Xenforo and will continue to do so. But if I don't get my traffic back; I might have to go back in time.

I see a lot of members having super amazing traffic levels after conversion to XF; but that doesn't seem to be the case with us.
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Late response and I don't know if this has been brought up before, but it sounds like one of two or three things might have happened:

* you lost PageRank for some reason, this you can check yourself, is it down relative to what it used to be under vB?
* you didn't redirect old indexed URLs after moving (or something went wrong)
* you didn't notify Google bots that your site uses new URLs (no sitemaps)

There are other things that can cause your problem, but it's very likely that it's some of the above. Traffic is linked to indexed URLs and SERP ranking. vBSEO takes care of static URLs & sitemaps. There's no reason that a switch to XenForo should have a long term negative impact on traffic unless something went wrong as stated above. XenForo actually has better SEO than vBulletin. vBSEO has a few extra features but nothing that should outperform XF's SEO by that much.

Do you remember the number of indexed URLs you use to have in Google under vB? How does it compare with the current number? Start with investigating things. There's a reason for what happened but it's not the forum software itself.
 
Two things are being mixed. Let me correct them by stating the sequence -

  1. We had setup proper redirects, but didn't use sitemap for the new URLs. (December 2011)
  2. We had traffic go down ~40% after we converted to XF.
  3. The traffic recovered very slowly for the 6-7 months.
  4. In September, 2012; our site experienced a ton of 404 errors because of JS bug in Disqus plugin.
  5. The problem was corrected by the end of September, but the error count had gone up to 99k; while the site has 450k indexed urls.
  6. By December 2012; all the errors have been 'removed' as reported by Google Webmaster Tools.
  7. There is no significant improvement in traffic; apart from our regular jump in traffic for period Jan - March.
 
TheBigK said:
Sequence
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Where in that list was your problem with Wordpress Tags 404ing ?
Remember ?
TheBigK said:
Just wanted to post an update.

After doing an intensive research, I've found out that it's the 404 errors caused by removal of lage number of tags from our wordpress blog causing the traffic to the site to go down. I need help in fixing those 404 errors by redirecting them to the homepage.

What I really need to do -

For every '404' page not found error on http://www.crazyengineers.com/tag/<keyword> (which results into 404), I want to setup a 301 redirect to homepage. But the regular 404 pages should just continue to work fine. Note that the /tag/<keyword> is important in setting up the rule.

I'm a complete noob when it comes to setting up redirects, and would appreciate your help.
Click to expand...

Other thread : http://xenforo.com/community/thread...emely-high-number-of-urls-on-your-site.39000/
 
Digital Doctor said:
Where in that list was your problem with Wordpress Tags 404ing ?
Remember ?


Other thread : http://xenforo.com/community/thread...emely-high-number-of-urls-on-your-site.39000/
Click to expand...

It's at #4. Disqus is a WP plugin that uses JavaScript. The bug was openly discussed on forums and was acknowledged by Google & Disqus. It turned out that the 'WP tags' related error was very minimum because I fixed it quickly by setting up redirect to homepage (for all tags that returned 404).

The link that you mentioned was another problem that occurred on our site after we installed xfrocks' widget framework plugin. I'm not sure if that plugin is the one to blame for the 'extremely high number of URLs'. I've had it disabled for 3 months; but have enabled it because of our users demanding it. It's just been ~1 week since I re-enabled it; so will have to see if I get the same message in GWT again.
 
Sorry for the confusion. I really take time to type my posts well.

1. Those two issues are different; but happened at the same time - which made me wonder what really caused the traffic to go down.
2. I deleted several thousand tags from WordPress towards the end of August and at the same time, the Disqus plugin issue popped. I was under impression that the 404s were all because of the tags I deleted (GWT reported both 404s - from disqus and tags, only 1000 at a time).
3. As days passed and I got access to more errors; I found out that the 404s arising out of tags were very minimum. The larger number of errors were all because of Disqus.

I think that should make it a bit clearer.
 
I don't know if this will make you feel any better but I will state this from experience seeing many sites with regard to SEO.

(1) Looking at your traffic logs, I'm wondering how much your site's issues have to do with Google's tweaking of their algorithm. After XF your site reverted to the traffic it had about 6 months earlier after some sudden huge growth and then you were in a decline. The results of tweaking can be shocking and completely out of your control.

(2) Webmaster tools helps. It can provide mixed results. Some changes Google responds to quickly. Others... good luck. I frequently get numerous errors for URLs that haven't existed for many, many months. Nothing I can do to tell Google "guys... it was deinstalled a LONG time ago!"

(3) Panda / Penguin can be site killers. There is this notion that if you "fix" things you'll "recover" your traffic. Unfortunately this is not the case. In many instances I've seen some sites continue a decline - good sites. There is also the reverse domino effect where lower traffic means lower UGC which then means more lower traffic, etc. It's tough.

Hang in there. I really loved your site when I first saw it. I enjoyed the unique name and it reminded me of all my nutty engineer close friends, of which there are many. If there is a way to work together, I'm glad to help as well. (My sites are now on the verge of conversions as well.)
 
TheLaw said:
(3) Panda / Penguin can be site killers. There is this notion that if you "fix" things you'll "recover" your traffic. Unfortunately this is not the case. In many instances I've seen some sites continue a decline - good sites. There is also the reverse domino effect where lower traffic means lower UGC which then means more lower traffic, etc. It's tough.
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I believe that that's what got me. Here's a chart showing Google traffic from the past number of months. Didn't change anything leading up to it and didn't change anything after I noticed it. Just rode it out and thankfully it's coming back.

(Those spikes are from some of our GoPro Hero 3 threads being ranked pretty high leading up to it's release)
google.webp
 
I'd also like to share this chart.

1: Switched from VB4 +vBSEO
2: Changed URL structure (Changed sub directory name)
3: Change URL structure (Moved forum to site root)
3.1: That sharp dip after the 3 is from the server being off line for most of the day.

It bounced around some between all those changes, but nothing major...which surprised me. I'm currently in the process of moving XF back into /forum/ and adding WordPress, wish me luck. :cool:
google2.webp
 
TheLaw said:
I don't know if this will make you feel any better but I will state this from experience seeing many sites with regard to SEO.

(1) Looking at your traffic logs, I'm wondering how much your site's issues have to do with Google's tweaking of their algorithm. After XF your site reverted to the traffic it had about 6 months earlier after some sudden huge growth and then you were in a decline. The results of tweaking can be shocking and completely out of your control.

(2) Webmaster tools helps. It can provide mixed results. Some changes Google responds to quickly. Others... good luck. I frequently get numerous errors for URLs that haven't existed for many, many months. Nothing I can do to tell Google "guys... it was deinstalled a LONG time ago!"

(3) Panda / Penguin can be site killers. There is this notion that if you "fix" things you'll "recover" your traffic. Unfortunately this is not the case. In many instances I've seen some sites continue a decline - good sites. There is also the reverse domino effect where lower traffic means lower UGC which then means more lower traffic, etc. It's tough.

Hang in there. I really loved your site when I first saw it. I enjoyed the unique name and it reminded me of all my nutty engineer close friends, of which there are many. If there is a way to work together, I'm glad to help as well. (My sites are now on the verge of conversions as well.)
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Thanks a ton for your response, @TheLaw. It's indeed true that there's no way to really figure out what really went wrong. It's a fact that I introduced several changes to upgrade 'user experience' and our loyal members absolutely love it. But Google doesn't.

I've accepted our new traffic and have decided to build from there - because, I've no other option. The only positive side is that this drop has helped us re-imagine everything.

@DBA: I'm quite sure that our site wasn't affected by Panda or Penguin, but even if it has - I've done almost everything in my capacity to 'fix' things. I'd just hope that the traffic bounces back like yours.

One big thing I learned from the whole experience is that there's no point in relying on Google (there never was!) and what Google's folks say in public may not be 100% accurate.
 
TheBigK said:
@Adam: The setup has been the same for years: WordPress on the main domain and forum on /forum (vB+vBSEO); which we migrated to XF on /community. Everything else's been the same. There were proper redirects and all!

Let me quickly answer your questions -

1. Domain is in my signature.
2. htaccess has redirects from old forum to XF
3. Robots.txt blocks unwanted WordPress pages and XF directories as well (which is based on the robots used on this website).
4. No IPs have been blocked from accessing the site.
5. We don't expose user signatures to public; but we've 10 posts per page, than 15 or 20 which seems to be the standard on most forums.
6. Outbound links are mostly moderated; but XF takes care of those links automatically; I suppose.
7. We've WP in main domain and forum in /community subdirectory.
8. Yep? Didn't get this question.

Google did change a few times; but the site was never affected; except for the decline we experienced starting December (after conversion to XF). I thought we'd recover in a few months; but full recovery (and growth) never happened.
Click to expand...

I have the same setup as you, for years, except my traffic has gone literally through the roof, 10,000 people on the forums at once is my record now, from maybe 150-200 people two years ago. I don't attribute more than 2% of our success to the new tools we use (xenforo). Sorry to hear things are rough for you though. I suffered slightly in the move from vbseo at the very beginning (aka the day this was released :p) but nothing that impacted on us like your situation. Why would your members up and leave? or are they just lurkers? those are my first thoughts - I don't provide a forum that is lurker friendly anyway so my first thoughts are where are your registered members "dropping off" too.
 
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