Sheffielder Posted July 31, 2018 Posted July 31, 2018 I've got quite an old forum going back years (2002 ish I think?) It's quite a big site now in terms of posts, threads, images etc If I were to archive much of it what difference would it make to anything? Is it worth NOT archiving? What does archiving actually do/affect? Would it affect SEO or the number of pages indexed by search engines?
The Old Man Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 Hello there! As I understand it, once you've configured your archiving preferences, a background task will regularly run to move the archived forum topics to a separate databases table or even a remote database, which has to be a positive performance-wise for the non-archived forums and topics by reducing demand on those tables for busy or large communities. On 7/31/2018 at 11:13 AM, Sheffielder said: If I were to archive much of it what difference would it make to anything? It's entirely relative to your archive settings. I would definitely consider archiving in your case. You could test it with one forum first, and it estimates how much content will be effected by your chosen configuration beforehand which is helpful. I didn't see any performance difference on my own forum site but I only have 9k topics and around 90k posts since 2002. My archive settings are set to archive unpinned and unfeatured topics older than 2 years which equates to 14% around 1300 topics which is probably too small to notice a difference. However it prevents people suddenly replying to 10yr-15yr old topics with remote images and emoticons missing etc. I wish the remote image cache had been around a decade ago, we lost so many good photo bucket imgs. On 7/31/2018 at 11:13 AM, Sheffielder said: Would it affect SEO or the number of pages indexed by search engines? I'm unaware of any SEO impact, there is a nice notice on archived content to remind users its an old topic which is closed for replies. You could tweak the language string to remind members they can create a new topic on the same subject. Go for it, a spring clean is always appreciated whatever the season!
Adriano Faria Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 Search will ignore archived topics so think well before you enable it.
The Old Man Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 What the heck? I never noticed that in the the small print but you're right! Quote Archived topics cannot be posted in or edited, and will not show in search results. That probably helps part-explain the massive drop in Google indexing so many have been complaining about. At least you can unarchive.
Nathan Explosion Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 41 minutes ago, The Old Man said: That probably helps part-explain the massive drop in Google indexing so many have been complaining about. How do you make that leap?
The Old Man Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 4 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said: How do you make that leap? 5 hours ago, The Old Man said: will not show in search results It's a reasonable assumption that it means search results in general, the advisory doesn't define the change as being limited to internal search results only and not external seo like including the topics in sitemaps. After disabling archiving and rebuilding sitemaps, it didn't give the usual warning about sitemaps already being updated and sent.
Nathan Explosion Posted August 1, 2018 Posted August 1, 2018 It is search results on the site itself....the topics/posts still have the same URLs (at least they did last time I played with archiving)
Sheffielder Posted August 5, 2018 Author Posted August 5, 2018 Thank you everyone this is perfect advice So will google/bing etc no longer link to or show any archived posts/topics?
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