Have you tried the Discourse Sitemap Plugin?
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.
Yes, itās running in production now.
1 Like
I see. And even though the whole hundreds of thousands of topics are in the sitemap, Googleās only looking at 10K of those per day? (My understanding of how this stuff works is entirely theoretical.)
It would seem like thereād be a way to tell search engines that itās the same data and that 301s would be that way, or that you could create a sitemap that passed all of the 301s en masse.
Here is a chart from google webmaster crawl stats:
My interpretation is that Google noticed that something was off on that domain, and a few days after the migration it crawled a massive amount of pages (160k, the peak on Sep 11 --migration was Sep 6). After that, it kept on crawling at higher rates than before.
There are no other obvious signs for Google to drop our ranking so dramatically.
Engagement on the forum hasnāt changed since the migration (actually, it has improved slightly since the migration). Of course we have margins to grow there but this discussion is specifically about SEO after a migration from an old platform.
3 Likes
Possibly something on this thread can help you? There are also some good links with even more info.
One of the important reasons is that the weight of each page has changed. It changes not only because the structure of the page has changed, but also for a number of reasons. For example:
1. Internal linking became different.
2. External sites link to other pages.
Against the background of other, general changes, this has led to your results.
If you still want (but I do not advise) to promote the site (at your own peril and risk), then it is necessary.
1. Determine which sites link to you, which pages, which anchor in the links.
2. Look at the addresses of links and anchors.
In no case should you change old links to new addresses and anchors. But you can try to add new links to the internal pages of the site.
Search engine algorithms are complex and interdependent items. We, for example, back in 2006 wrote more than 1,000 terms.
To guess, not knowing exact dependence, does not make sense. But the general recommendations written above can help. Just do not change the anchor and addresses of old links on other sites.
Continue adding weight not only to the central page but also to the internal pages of the site by linking to external sites, always taking into account the subject matter of the sites. And take care of the activity on the site.
The site has changed, if activity has also fallen, then this is another sign that the search can find that people did not like the site after the changes. This is not true. But the algorithm only looks at the data. He needs time.
Try to do, say, on one of your pages that is written above.
Wrote with Google Translator
6 Likes
I can see the site is still around, curious how the numbers are looking these days? We made quite a few changes over the past 2 years.
7 Likes
I donāt know since I donāt manage that site anymore, sorry. Iāll reach out to my former colleagues to see if they can respond to this question.
10 Likes
Hey!
interesting thread.
I migrated a 2007 phpBB with 300000 posts to Discourse about 2 weeks ago.
The website URL changed from http://www.vw-camper.fr to https://vw-camper.fr with a proper redirect from www to no subdomain.
Also, the migration script set proper 301 redirections from old links to new links.
Multiple users complained that typing āvw camperā in Google doesnāt display the site in top results anymore, even not on the first page.
Also, a weird thingā¦ Not very important, just being curious. This is what one of my users reported when typing āvw camper.frā related string on google:
This is the old website description butā¦ What is this hideous URL?
http://www.vw-camper.frwww.vw-camper.fr 
Just a bug I believe?
Is that still valid information after a migration in 2022? Should we just wait a few months for the forum to regain its previous SEO ranking?
1 Like
Could it be that the 301 redirect from www.vw-camper.fr to vw-camper.fr was misconfigured for a time and that was where the 301 redirect sent it? Something like that it my best guess and I think might explain some things.
2 Likes
