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 contains less content than what a browser sees (no indication of reply, login, search or suggested topics, among other things.) Has anybody noticed similar traffic drops after a migration from ‘old-school’ html forums? Any suggestion on how to fix things on our forums?

OLD_URL has some accrued relevance score in Google. It has not changed in a long time, so Google is going to wait quite awhile before it crawls it again. NEW_URL, of course, has identical content to OLD_URL but no relevance score. We both know that OLD_URL has been changed to a 301 redirect leading to NEW_URL, but Google won’t know that until it re-crawls it, which it’s not going to do very often. So instead of seeing a moved page, Google thinks there’s a copied page. That won’t change until it re-crawls all of the old pages and sees the 301s. Maybe you could make a sitemap with the old URLs and a recent updated date, so that Googlebot will recrawl all of the old URLs and learn about the 301 redirects?

[изображение] smaffulli: I knew that switching to Discourse would have an impact Go to any other script have the same effect. Ranking in search engines depends on a number of parameters. To the old version of the site Google has developed a level of trust. He determined the frequency of scans and calculated the weight of the pages, etc.. And everything has changed. How to respond to this search engine? At least, mistrust. This reaction is common. Redirect only showed that a new page has changed address. But to search engines these pages have changed! They do not become better or worse (depending on many factors), they just became different. The weight of the pages (PR), everything has changed…

Like we keep saying, you need to wait at least three months. At least. Maybe more. If you are looking for quick fixes, SWITCH BACK TO YOUR OLD SOFTWARE.

[изображение] notriddle: Maybe you could make a sitemap with the old URLs and a recent updated date, so that Googlebot will recrawl all of the old URLs and learn about the 301 redirects? I like this suggestion, I’ll do it. Another area I’m investigating is the default nginx rate limits as well, as maybe Googlebot is hitting them? Thanks for the help everybody, got plenty of ideas already. @sam I have applied your patch but to another forum that I am building out from scratch. I’m not comfortable applying it in production though as at the moment I don’t think that’s the root cause of the dropping traffic.

[изображение] smaffulli: So Google notices a switch to a better URL structure, same content, pretty presentation and penalizes the new pages? Google is not penalizing anything. It just needs to adjust. Adjusting takes time. Be patient :smiley:

OK. You go to a grocery store all the time. Ad old, mom-n-pop style, old-60’s store. Very reputable. You trust it. You tell your friends that their goods there have good quality and come from reputable sources. Then they moved to a new, shiny location. With a brand-new store, and all new faces. On the door of the old store that’s a notice: “301 - We’ve moved!” Inside the brand-new store, they sell exactly the same stuff. But you don’t recognize the store any more. Sure, it’s modern and great and everything, but do you TRUST it? Will you recommend it to all your friends? Or will you observe for a while? Do you smell something fishy is going on? Are these the same people? Or have they sold out to a money-grabbing new MNC? In other words, will the new store’s Page Rank be the same as the old store?

[изображение] michaeld: Google is not penalizing anything How would you describe when many of the top performing pages have lost their top-10 status in the Google results page and are now on page 2? Google is indexing the site at the rate of 8-10k pages a day, up from the 2k/day average before the migration to Discourse. Googlebot is getting pages a lot faster than before, from 800ms to 70ms with Discourse. Everything seems to be going fine except the massive traffic drop, which keeps on dropping. Is it possible that the default rate-limiting protections are slowing down googlebot?

Seems like you do not have many active members engaging in the threads on your site. You have to give it some time and try to get some of your members to help promote your forum. Encourage your members to start threads. This is just an outside observation, based on the reply counts. Dont worry so much about google, keep your site moving with interesting and engaging content. Hope this helps. Good luck.

[изображение] pfaffman: Have you tried the Discourse Sitemap Plugin? Yes, it’s running in production now.

Massive traffic drop from Google searches after migrating from myBB

Product Support

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) 09.Октябрь.2017 17:33:05 21

Have you tried the Discourse Sitemap?

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Massive traffic drop from Google searches after migrating from myBB

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