Hey!
I manage a community support forum (community helping and supporting each other).
Over the last 3 months, we’ve noticed a consistent downwards trend in traffic coming from Google.
Considering topics and posts are UGC (and naturally aren’t geared towards having SEO in mind), how are you improving your search results?
Hey Noah,
Have you seen the following articles?
I dont think this really pertains to changes that made on google regularly. Not looking at when you search for a brand or website all together,obviously you will show up.
But searching for some keywords in a topic we were ranking against other forums at least on mid and bottom of first page and just checked yesterday, now we are gone from google. The forums ranking dont have any special SEO tricks. Just an someone posted a question about them and maybe 2 or 3 responses.
Googles last core update was a month ago it seems. Im not sure why we dropped off completely on certain terms. But I’ll try to make some changes at least in content. What I do notice is that some of the pages of other forums its showing the page ranking as say page 4. Im not sure how its handling the loading on discourse for how it searchs. But we have threads hundreds of comments long that dont show when searching the topic.
I dont see anything in the whats stated that would be reason why mine is dropping and other forums are ranking much much higher with less content and responses.
We restructured our forum around the time of this topic - moving from 16 categories to 3 - shared more info about it here:
We’ve spent a fair amount of time making sure topic titles are reflective of the topic, and that things are tagged correctly.
Each month, we also export the top results we ranked for in Google Search console and manually review the topics - checking that if they have a solution, they’re marked as solved, and if they don’t have a solution, providing one. The assumption is, that if those are ranking regularly, and we don’t have a solution, people are less likely to return as they didn’t find value.
Here’s a little preview of our Google search results before and after making adjustments 
While this did work for us, I’m no SEO expert, so can’t say if this will work for others
