Adam Howard
Well-known member
You said it yourself....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.
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.