XF 1.2 vB4 -> xF migration and Seo effect

[giorgino]

Iv'e just migrated a forum from vB4 to xF 1.5 in april... and the indexed pages are decreased a lot.
The forum count 36.000+ users and 150.000 posts.

Any advice?

 

[giorgino]

(the board is www.propit.it)

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

Did you redirect your old urls to the new xenforo links?

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

Also you have this line in your robots.txt file :

Disallow: /forums/-/

Any specific reason why you have it there?

 

[giorgino]

Did you redirect your old urls to the new xenforo links?

Yes, anyway after more than 5 months the new urls are indexed...

Also you have this line in your robots.txt file :

Disallow: /forums/-/

Any specific reason why you have it there?

Nope. I've copied the robots.txt here on xf.com...

This is the graph with "blocked by robot" in orange...



As you can see, only 5/6.000 urls are blocked by robots.txt...
Where are the other 70/80.000 URL's?

 

[Weppa333]

Anything I search on your board (choosing an old thread from a random forum and copy pasting text from it inside google) gets a result in google, so your pages are indeed crawled and indexed.

The question is more, what were the previous 80000 URLs ?
VB has a specialty in multiplying the same content all over the web (the infamous printthread, single messages pages, etc)

 

[Weppa333]

Google reports 134,000 pages indexed for your board, at this time.
Forget this graph.

Do you see a major drop of trafic ?

 

[giorgino]

your pages are indeed crawled and indexed.

I don't agree.
I've 22.522 threads. Where are in index results?

Entering

site:propit.it

there are only 819 results
Where are the other 20K threads?

Al fine di visualizzare i risultati più pertinenti, sono state omesse alcune voci molto simili alle 687 già visualizzate.
Se vuoi, puoi ripetere la ricerca includendo i risultati omessi.

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

I would advise you to take this line off : Disallow: /forums/-/ This is very important and should be done right away.

Also consider adding /members there to the disallow list as you have restricted guests from viewing member profiles. You can allow Google media if you have ads on there.

 

[giorgino]

Do you see a major drop of trafic ?

YES!

 

[Weppa333]

Actually you board is (now) at PROPIT.IT not at www.propit.it as far as google is concerned

the indexed page graph you're showing is probably referring to www.propit, you probably did change something in your config (remove www) along with swtiching to XF

Currently you clearly have double content, www and without WWW serve the same thing ( bad)

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

I don't agree.
I've 22.522 threads. Where are in index results?

Enetering siteropit.it there are only 819 results
Where are the other 20K threads?

That is mainly because of that line in your robots.txt. Take it off and give it "3" days and dont forget to update this thread how it went.

 

[Weppa333]

site: propit.it report 134K result

site:www.propit.it reports... 5000 rsults, and lowering at each reload.

You're in a double content situation, and google chose to index "propit.it" for whatever reasons. It probably punished you for double content. The migration probably didn't help either.

SEO is a job (PS Mike, /posts/ is gonna kill you someday )

 

[giorgino]

That is mainly because of that line in your robots.txt. Take it off and give it "3" days and dont forget to update this thread how it went.

Now my robots.txt is

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /scripts/
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /find-new/
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /goto/
Disallow: /posts/
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /admin.php
Disallow: /ajax/
Disallow: /conversations/
Disallow: /lost-password/
Disallow: /misc/style?*
Disallow: /misc/quick-navigation-menu?*
Disallow: /online/
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.immobilio.it/sitemap/sitemap.xml.gz

Actually you board is (now) at PROPIT.IT not at www.propit.it as far as google is concerned

the indexed page graph you're showing is probably referring to www.propit, you probably did change something in your config (remove www) along with swtiching to XF

Currently you clearly have double content, www and without WWW serve the same thing ( bad)

Uh

So what I can change? xf Board URL or Google webmaster preferences?

 

[Weppa333]

The content is there, and /forum/-/ cannot really hurt but should be removed.

Don't get me started about /posts/ either But it seems XF's team has made their decision. Anyway.

Giorgino, the first thing you have to do is decide what URL you want. I fyou switch "back" to www.propit.it you are gonna kill your traffic for another 6 months, this has to be taken into account.
If you decide to keep the fact that, currently, google knows your board by the name "propit.it" and considers "www.propit.it" as duplicated content, you have to
- switch www.propit.it off.
- redirect www.propit -> propit.it ( googlebot is an idiotic piece of garbage that needs a lot of explanations )
- create a new "google webmaster tools" site for "propit.it" ( not an account, just a new site in your account)

you should see all your pages there now

Also make sure of the URLs in your sitemaps, your internal links, etc... There are probably countless implications to your "involuntary switch" of domain names.

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

I believe you should set it to whatever you were using before the move as all the old inlinks must be pointing to that version of your urls. Also check what have you redirected in your .htaccess file.. www or without www because if your board didint have www before and the urls you redirected assumes you had www then you havent ineffect redirected the old url.
Some one please correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Weppa333]

As I suspected, you have internal links to the "wrong" destination (took me a while to find one of your messages where you are referring to your own board with a link, but here is an example)

http://propit.it/threads/avatar-a-cosa-serve.6166/

refers to
http://www.propit.it/f66/coloriamo-proprit-avatar-o-faccina-4828/
(bottom of message)

So this is... a mess I'm afraid...


either edit all your internal links and send them back to "propit"

Or switch AGAIN to www.propit ; but as I said, prepare for a couple of months of no adsense revenues

PS
Googlebot is the most overrated piece of garbage this side of the universe.

 

[Parminder Singh Chahal]

Your member profiles are not viewable by guests so that also needs to be added to the disallow list in your robots.txt

 

[giorgino]

Or switch AGAIN to www.propit ; but as I said, prepare for a couple of months of no adsense revenues

I've to thank you very much Sir...

Your member profiles are not viewable by guests so that also needs to be added to the disallow list in your robots.txt

Added it! Thank you Sir

I'll report back in few days for feedback.
For now, thank you guys very very much!

 

[giorgino]

Your member profiles are not viewable by guests

Yes, they are viewable by guests...
http://www.propit.it/members/jac0.12248/