Simple explanations and advice about Google indexing please

[BankFodder]

Well I've had a fair bit of skule in my life and also youniversitey but all of this Google and indexing stuff is completely scrambling my brains. I would really like to begin simply with some explanations so if anyone has the time I'd be really grateful.

Can anyone tell me what "excluded" means and why 1.04 million pages are presently excluded and what does it mean when it says that 295,000 are called but currently not indexed?
Also, although I took the screenshot this morning – 21st of March – the last entry is dated 16 March and it has been like that for the past three days or so. Has it ground to a halt? And why?

Also, on our forum we have about 5 million posts in about 500,000 topics. I don't see where the correlation is between those figures and one half million pages – including the half a million valid ones.

Just to let people know bit of background, about three weeks ago we converted from vBulletin to Invision with a catastrophic fall in revenue and I'm in a panic.

I expect I have lots of other questions but maybe somebody could start by giving me a heads up on this.

 

[Sovereign Grace Singles]

Does anyone really know how Google works? Seriously, I think there isn't much you can do but ride out the analytics for 2-3 months and see how Google reindexes the information.

I migrated from Vbulletin to IPS and it took about that long before things began to stabilize. After 3 months I began to see analytics that were on par with what they were before the migration.

[opentype]

3 minutes ago, BankFodder said:

Can anyone tell me what "excluded" means

It means the pages are not in the Google index and won’t be found with a Google search. 

3 minutes ago, BankFodder said:

 what does it mean when it says that 295,000 are called but currently not indexed?

It means Google looked at the content, but didn’t found it worth indexing at this time. 

[BankFodder]

2 minutes ago, Christforums said:

Does anyone really know how Google works? Seriously, I think there isn't much you can do but ride out the analytics for 2-3 months and see how Google reindexes the information.

I migrated from Vbulletin to IPS and it took about that long before things began to stabilize. After 3 months I began to see analytics that were on par with what they were before the migration.

 

1 minute ago, opentype said:

It means the pages are not in the Google index and won’t be found with a Google search. 

It means Google looked at the content, but didn’t found it worth indexing at this time. 

Blimey, an amazingly rapid reply. You guys must really have nothing better to do – but thank you very much!

I'm very pleased to find somebody else who  has had difficulty migrating from vBulletin – I suppose that if I'm in the brown stuff then I'd rather have company – not a very noble thought.

In terms of Google not finding anything worth indexing, - apart from my hurt feelings – is there anything I can do about this? Why is it that Google hasn't been around since 16 March although with the mobile usability, Google seems to have visited yesterday.

Is it really that easy (and painful) – just sit and wait?

[bfarber]

When you migrate from ANY software to another software, you are going to experience a short term dip - and then hopefully a longer-term recovery (clients migrating to Invision Community do tend to see this recovery and improvement after the initial dip). The problem is that every single URL google has indexed for your site has suddenly changed from the old format to the new format our software uses. We do send 301 redirection for topics, posts, profiles and other things, so Google will be directed to the new URL and will update its index, but this takes time. Then, you have to consider the fact that the entire underlying page HTML code has changed as well, and every other page that a single page links to has a new URL compared to the old site, and you can start to visualize why Google has to spend some time updating what it already has stored for your site.

Some content will be seen and not indexed, and that's fine generally speaking. Some content is and should be explicitly excluded, such as user profiles where the user has never contributed to the site in any way (there's really nothing there for Google to index).

With ~500K topics you should end up with slightly more than 500K entries in Google's index, so it sounds like you are on track. Unfortunately, I do agree that you are going to be in a bit of wait and see territory for the next couple of months while Google reindexes your site. It is simply the nature of converting to any other software.

[Morgin]

I had an approx 3 month dip in revenue simply moving from http to https. Google is a fickle beast. It came back better.