xen to vbull conversion

[TheLaw]

Only reason is that for 3 years traffic climbed nicely to about 35.000 uniques a month, since moving to xen in April it declined to now 12.o00 from search engines

If your forum is the one I think it is, then it's quite possible that your problem is Panda. If you really want to wait longer, do yet another re-indexing. Nobody knows for sure but two major URL changes is tough... and it may not be your problem.

 

[Mike Law]

I am sure it is,...
PANDA?

 

[TheLaw]

I am sure it is,... www.lawstudentforum.co.uk
PANDA?

Do you not know what it is? It's Google's new search engine algorithm that has turned the world upside down. Yes, I thought this was your site, which consists of a forum and no additional content. If Panda is your problem, it's not your fault at all. Do you have analytics installed on your site? Have you compared Google to Bing and Yahoo and seen the results? Did you have any drop in results prior to your switchover?

 

[Mike Law]

Hi.,

Before the switch we moved up nicely,

 

[TheLaw]

Hi.,
Before the switch we moved up nicely,

So did many. The issue is your traffic compared to Bing and Yahoo.

 

[ManagerJosh]

Only reason is that for 3 years traffic climbed nicely to about 35.000 uniques a month, since moving to xen in April it declined to now 12.o00 from search engines

Stupid question, but ultimately important, but did you use this add-on? http://xenforo.com/community/threads/redirection-scripts-for-vbulletin-3-x.5030/

 

[Mike Law]

Yeah one of the xenforo staff was very kind and wrote a redirect for all vbseo links to xenforo,

 

[HydraulicJack]

Ask on the vBulletin forum.

LOL, good one!

 

[HydraulicJack]

Yeah one of the xenforo staff was very kind and wrote a redirect for all vbseo links to xenforo,

You might also ask the folks at Planet Ocean
They're pretty helpful on matters such as this.

 

[CTXMedia]

When I moved CycleChat from vB3.8.4 to IP.Board it took almost 12 months for things to settle back down with Google and for referring traffic to get back to normal - even with redirects in place.

I found that page loading speed made a difference too. How fast is your site running? Have you done any optimisation work on it/the server? How does Google's page loading speed graph look in webmaster tools? Does it show pages loading slower/faster?

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Only reason is that for 3 years traffic climbed nicely to about 35.000 uniques a month, since moving to xen in April it declined to now 12.o00 from search engines

You think maybe because your URLs all changed with the new forum, or that you're not promoting it as much as before? It doesn't seem as if a forum change, assuming your members are happy with the change, would suddenly impact your site traffic that much.

In my case, we only converted our smallest, relatively inactive forum first, about a week ago, so the jury's out as to how traffic is impacted, since most of our visitor traffic involves checking out our radio shows, and downloading episodes.

 

[Carlos]

The change to xenforo was favorable for me, and I didn't need to use vBSEO redirects. Nothing.

I was using vBSuite with vBSEO.

 

[Dean]

Only reason is that for 3 years traffic climbed nicely to about 35.000 uniques a month, since moving to xen in April it declined to now 12.o00 from search engines

Check your server logs. I found some incredibly bizarre things happening in our apache access_log and error_log e.g. google was still trying to access the vb3.8 calendar, albums, etc. I tweaked the robots.txt file and submitted a site map. Our traffic is definitely up after doing those things.