# SEO & Forums
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198
**Category:** Community Building
**Tags:** seo
**Created:** [September 26, 2024, 8:59am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198 "2024-09-26T08:59:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@noahl](https://meta.discourse.org/u/noahl)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2024, 8:59am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198/1 "2024-09-26T08:59:48Z")
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?
---
### Author:  [@HAWK](https://meta.discourse.org/u/HAWK)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2024, 9:07am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198/2 "2024-09-26T09:07:04Z")
Hey Noah,
Have you seen the following articles?
> **[8 Tips to Improve Your Community’s SEO](https://blog.discourse.org/2021/10/forum-seo/)**
>
> Helping people find your community takes time and patience. It also takes a little knowledge about search engines, how they work, and how people locate your community through them. In this article, we’re going to demystify the basics of SEO and how...
> **[Handling SEO for Discourse Communities](https://blog.discourse.org/2021/11/discourse-forum-seo/)**
>
> If you are concerned about how your community is performing in search engine results (SEO), there are a number of questions to keep in mind when looking to optimize your community software of choice. We frequently get asked questions in our support...
---
### Author:  [@flash](https://meta.discourse.org/u/flash)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2024, 10:13am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198/3 "2024-09-26T10:13:17Z")
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.
> **[Google Search's Core Updates | Google Search Central | Documentation | ...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/core-updates)**
>
> Learn about how core updates work, and what you can do to assess and perhaps improve your content.
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.
---
### Author:  [@noahl](https://meta.discourse.org/u/noahl)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2025, 11:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-forums/328198/10 "2025-07-25T11:10:14Z")
We restructured our forum around the time of this topic - moving from 16 categories to 3 - shared more info about it here:
> [@Do users properly use categories?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/do-users-properly-use-categories/345424/9):
>
> A few extra insights into how we got to 3 categories (only 2 of which users can create topics in). I know cutting back on categories can be hard! 😅
>
> We had 16 categories when we first launched our forum—each based around a conversation style: “Ask a question”, “General”, “Feedback”, etc.
>
> Not only was it frustrating to manage and make sure everything was organised correctly, but it was also frustrating for users. We saw a month-over-month decrease in engagement and activity—simply because topics were incorrectly categorized.
>
> We moved from “conversation style” categories to “intent-based” categories and have seen significant increases in engagement and retention.
>
> We asked ourselves why people came to our forum, and it all boiled down to asking questions and showing off projects. We then use tags to separate topics within categories (e.g., “code”, “design”, “cms”, etc.).
>
> A little preview into our thought processes:
>
> 
* * *
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
