Big drop in Google traffic after migration

[eba]

In the past 90 days we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic Google is feeding us.

Before Discourse, our community lived in Vbulletin.
I’m afraid something is off with the transition.
A year ago, we saw an average of 200 clicks per day to the site, today that number officially reached zero.
I have a feeling the discourse slug c/c/279331 has a lot to do with it.
Of course, the huge amount of 301 errors that arouse from the transition didn’t help either.

While the community is big and thriving, this obviously has taken a toll on the community’s traction and presence.

our site is in Hebrew so it may not help too many to view it but for whatever it’s worth it’s sport enter .co.il - I prefer not to be crawled picked up by Google so just connect sport + enter + .co.il sorry to be annoying with that.

Any ideas ?! Help !

[codinghorror]

When did you switch? It takes about a year for things to normalize after a big forum software switch.

[pfaffman]

Of course, the huge amount of 301 errors that arouse from the transition didn’t help either.

Did you not put 301 redirects in place when you transitioned?

Have you tried the Discourse Sitemap Plugin?

[sam]

See previous discussion here:

Massive traffic drop from Google searches after migrating from myBB

Almost 3 weeks ago we migrated an old forum from myBB to Discourse, bringing all the content and creating proper 301 redirects for all old threads, categories and topics. Since the move, our incoming traffic from search engine has dropped over 20%, so far inexplicably. Our SEO consultant has highlighted that serving different content to the crawler may be one of the reasons that Google treats the new forums so poorly compared to the past. The version seen by Google of a topic page for example c…

At a minimum be sure to follow all the stuff there, proper 301 redirects for EVERY old topic URL pointing to new one. Potentially consider sitemap to accelerate stuff.

If you have a blanket 302 just pointing to the main site I would expect pain.

You need a lot more details here:

• Example of OLD url
• Example of NEW home of content

[eba]

I’ll try everything reccomended above !

Is there a plug-in/gem to help maintain 301 redirects?

[jonobacon]

Is there a plug-in/gem to help maintain 301 redirects?

Can’t you just do this with a configuration directive?

[smaffulli]

you need to build a list of the old URL and build redirect mapping either in nginx or directly inside Discourse /admin/customize/permalinks. Before you embark in such effort, it’s worth checking with SEO experts if it makes sense at all now: 90+ days have passed and Google may have already decided to scrap he old URL since they haven’t worked for so long. I’m not SEO expert though, please check.

The first thing I’ve done is install the sitemap plugin… waiting to see if it has any effect (after 1 week nothing changed, traffic still dropping.)

[codinghorror]

Sitemap only slightly increases speed of indexing new pages. It has no serious effect unless your site cannot be spidered coherently, and that is a massive systemic defect to carry forward.

[eba]

Is there a tool/plugin out there that can help manage the site in terms of SEO ?

Pages, Categories, Tags Meta etc. ?

In a sense, similar to what Yoast provides in a Wordpress world.