Massive Google Drop Since v4

[Guest]

Hello,

I was running v2.2.2 and Google Webmaster tools kept moaning about mobile compatibility since last year. I took the plunge towards the end of Feb and updated to v4.1 - and now my traffic has gone through the floor

Clicky Pic

Any idea why? This is raw clicks, so shouldn't be anything to do with users not enjoying the 4 feel and presumably everything to do with the way the v4 board indexes and shows in results?

[Guest]

Hmm - I may have just partly found the answer myself - or at least the reason. Do a search for site:domainname reveals it is now only listing our calendar!! So something maybe has gone wrong with the sitemap or their indexing since the change over.

[MADMAN32395]

14 minutes ago, SiDHEaD said:

updated to v4.1 - and now my traffic has gone through the floor

oddly enough thats a common complaint from older versions converting to the new version. My theory on this is that its picking up on more true traffic, instead of artificial traffic by other means (such as other bots, etc.)

[BlowingWind]

Check the release notes for 4.1.9, IPB just fixed some bugs in the sitemap generation where sometimes the sitemap is not complete. It happened to me too,

 

[Guest]

Literally no results even on searching my username and the words in the site name though... Very odd.

I just went to the sitemap page and changed it from use recommended and when trying to save defaults it came up with 2 errors under the tickboxes for "Do Not Include" saying not allowed. Ticking saving and then unticking sorted this - so maybe there was a problem...

1 minute ago, Hendry said:

Check the release notes for 4.1.9, IPB just fixed some bugs in the sitemap generation where sometimes the sitemap is not complete. It happened to me too,

 

Aha! And i was holding off doing the upgrade till over the weekend, maybe i need to bring that forward. Thanks!

Typical really. I had a drive on to get people on that would want to make donations for a rhino charity thing that closes in a week. Instead i've had barely any visitors and we're only just scraping our target.

[tnn]

Just a heads up, the sitemap would not be the source of your forum dropping through the floor. Sitemaps make it more convenient for search engines to pick up new pages but if the page is already indexed, sitemap won't have any affect on that page. 

[Guest]

Hmm very strange then.

And now i've done this latest upgrade img tags are not working, they change to {option}

Beginning to wish i had stuck with v2.2.2 and saved loads of money and effort.

[tnn]

1 hour ago, SiDHEaD said:

Hmm very strange then.

And now i've done this latest upgrade img tags are not working, they change to {option}

Beginning to wish i had stuck with v2.2.2 and saved loads of money and effort.

Google webmaster can give you a clue as far as the decrease in visits. In crawl errors, you can look at which links are no longer found and see where they are linked from. You may see some old threads that were generating traffic but are no longer at the same url. They generate the 404 not found pages. A percentage of visitors will simply leave. 

For the more important pages I hand tailor a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file. Something like this:
# 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /old-url.php http://www.MyForum.com/new-url.php

If your forum has been up for years, and there is a following, then there is a good chance inbound links were generating a lot of traffic for you - and they are no longer there. Moving forward, you may want to also add Google Analytics or another stats tool that analyzes your traffic.

[sudo]

I am using https://www.deepcrawl.com/ to do some testing before we do our migration, its crazy expensive but its quite a tool I have to say.

[Elena-Viorica]

My community dropped in Alexa ranking from position 400,000 to position 1 million after the upgrade to IPS 4. My traffic is pretty much the same, ok, maybe a little less activity, but that drop is huge...

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Elena-Viorica said:

My community dropped in Alexa ranking from position 400,000 to position 1 million after the upgrade to IPS 4. My traffic is pretty much the same, ok, maybe a little less activity, but that drop is huge...

Yikes! Have you done any work to rectify it?

[ABGenc]

58 minutes ago, SiDHEaD said:

Yikes! Have you done any work to rectify it?

Have you checked if your sitemap really includes the topics and boards ?

After my upgrade I have realised that the following setting was set to Do not include instead of Use Default Priority

[Guest]

Just checked that... all good.

[Guest]

This error on the sitemap might not be helping I guess. And as for why so little are indexed, I don't know

 

 

Maybe this error is causing it?

 

[tnn]

Yes, that is definitely an issue. Less is being indexed because your sitemap has an problem. You might try first resubmitting the sitemap in Google Webmasters and if you still get the error, submit a support request. Or submit a support request first if you want. Again this has nothing to do with the visitor drop of pages that are already indexed but this will hurt you on new pages. When I upgraded to 4.x I had a Sitemap problem also.  

Okay Correction.
You may no longer have that forum that Google is clamoring about and that is why you may be getting that error. As the forum updates the sitemap (possibly a background proccess?) that error will go away. Again this is if you have removed a forum (forum topic 8.)

 

[opentype]

I would guess this is caused by the fact, that the already crawled URLs for the whole site weren’t redirected to the new 4.0 URL scheme. You should see that in the Google Search Console under crawling errors. I don’t know if something went wrong there or whether an upgrade from such an old version just doesn’t set any redirects. As a result, for Google, your old site basically disappeared (and is therefore not worth showing in the results anymore) and now the whole process of indexing and earning relevance will start from scratch. That can take time.

[Guest]

I put a load of redirect rules in the .htaccess, but it was when I saw things dropping and checked the errors.

I've just had to re-add the site from fresh for https listing anyway, and the same numbers for submit and index have come up so I guess i need to raise a support ticket to get the sitemap corrected.

[opentype]

It was already said, but I would also like to stress that a sitemap is just a more convenient way for the search engine to discover new content on your site. It’s not a requirement and a failing sitemap won’t result in the problems you have with the Google index. In turn, fixing the sitemap won’t do much to fix your Google listing. 

[Mopar1973Man]

I can say that if you converting from an older software or different software with very different URL's then, most of the URLs will be most likely dumped as 404's and then Google has to rewalk and reindex your placement. I've just converted two other sites from vB3.8 to IPS4 and the same thing happened. As even on my site I upgraded then moved Joomla to IP.Pages and the net result was a good move on the forum URL's because using 301 redirects but being I redesigned the Joomla information on the IP.Pages there was no way to filter or to hook the URL back up. So I took a bit of a fall as Google rewalked the site, reindexed and replaced position wise.

[Mopar1973Man]

Another tidbit also... Google will give bonuses for URL age. So for older URL you'll be place back nearly where you were quickly.  Having SSL certificate does help as well another Google point boost too on being indexing quickly and placed well too.

[Guest]

Thanks for info

[AlexWebsites]

On 3/27/2016 at 0:45 PM, Mopar1973Man said:

I can say that if you converting from an older software or different software with very different URL's then, most of the URLs will be most likely dumped as 404's and then Google has to rewalk and reindex your placement. I've just converted two other sites from vB3.8 to IPS4 and the same thing happened. As even on my site I upgraded then moved Joomla to IP.Pages and the net result was a good move on the forum URL's because using 301 redirects but being I redesigned the Joomla information on the IP.Pages there was no way to filter or to hook the URL back up. So I took a bit of a fall as Google rewalked the site, reindexed and replaced position wise.

Did your traffic return to pre-conversion levels? I updated a site from vbulletin in october to version 4 and now moved to https and my traffic dropped about 30%. I've redirected and checked my top urls in google anaytics, but it seems that my page rank dropped. Google is still re-crawling some of my https pages.