SEO best practice for IPB sites

[Gauravk]

I am not sure how many of you guys have recently been impacted with sudden traffic drop after latest google algorithm change.

We have lost over 70% organic traffic and now settling between 30-40% loss after a while.

Looking at GWT I got really surprise how google is not factoring so many URL's now. I understand the content value of profile, likes and comments url are pretty low but why so many second, third, fourth pages of actually valuable discussions are also not indexed....?

Is that because of ?&page=2#comments used by IPB instead of straight URL? Is there a way to change them...?

Appreciate to hear any other SEO ideas that you guys are implementing to keep search giants happy.

[opentype]

58 minutes ago, Gauravk said:

Is that because of ?&page=2#comments used by IPB instead of straight URL? Is there a way to change them...?

Probably not. If Google decides not to index a page or decrease the visibility in search results, messing with URLs probably won’t change that. All Google cares about is how valuable your pages might be for certain users with certain search queries. 

[Gauravk]

25 minutes ago, opentype said:

Probably not. If Google decides not to index a page or decrease the visibility in search results, messing with URLs probably won’t change that. All Google cares about is how valuable your pages might be for certain users with certain search queries. 

Of course that's the most easiest way to brush problems under the carpet.

Not sure about others here, but we have very "UNIQUE" and "USEFUL" Car content in UAE and GCC (7 countries), that people are paying to access and renewing it every month as no other car community, clubs, forums are existing in GCC countries.

Somehow search giants intelligence is lacking in decoding its value, "maybe" our content is talking in spanish to english speaking mind.

Hope someone understand here, what exactly I meant.

[opentype]

Seriously? I give you an honest and reasonable answer and you misrepresent that as “sweeping things under the rug” and “not understanding you”. 
If you can’t handle answers that don’t agree with what you expect, don’t ask. 

And I’m saying that running 3 IPS communities which were all hit heavily by the March Core Update. But I’m still not inventing reasons to put the blame on IPS, since neither I, nor you have any evidence the blame lies here – or in any technical details such as URL structures. If you have any, put it forward and I will agree. If you don’t, I will point out that your speculations are probably baseless, just as I did. 

Let me make my point again using a source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-march-2019-update-fix/300461/#close

Quote

Google’s core value is not to show the most “trustworthy” sites or sites with the most or “best” links. Because some times the best answer is one with less links.

Google’s algorithm is focused on the user and what they want to see. So it follows that diagnosing why a site dropped rankings in the March 2019 update begins with figuring out where the disconnect is between your content and the user.

 

[Gauravk]

48 minutes ago, opentype said:

since neither I, nor you have any evidence the blame lies here – or in any technical details such as URL structures.

You nailed it, perfectly.

I'm not here to blame anyone for anything (read the title again: SEO best practice for IPB sites), its called EVOLUTION.

And as a community manager we also need to evolve with new changes being it quality, url structure, canonical. All these were acceptable in previous years before google start kicking everyone down. Maybe now they have come up with a new stuff that we still don't know.

Since no one knows the clear answer, so I'm asking other IPB owners of what new stuff or best practice they are adopting (if any).

Anyways, thanks for your input and link.

[Maxxius]

Have you read this, perhaps this would help you in some way?

 

[Gauravk]

Thanks these are the things for which I made this topic to learn what we dont know.

I'll have a look at this soon, I vaguely rem in our last seo audit in Jan something also popped up on similar lines of noindex, need to dig that too.

Thanks a lot @Maxxius

[AlexWebsites]

@Gauravk I think you are on something, so I checked my indexed pages for topics that have more than one page. Some are indexed and some are not. The one significant issue I did find checking a couple of my IPS sites is that none of the secondary pages have a meta description tag. The first page uses the first post in the topic as its meta description (unless you have a defined tag for that url in ACP) but the secondary topic pages have nothing. It would be good if they had something for a meta description. Maybe the first post of that page or something like that or if not enough, a combination of additional post characters up to 300.

Not sure if this is by design to not have page meta description tags or not.

From Google:

Create good meta descriptions

Google will sometimes use the <meta> description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for. There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.

Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description.

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

 

Also, the secondary page links are like:

https://www.mysite.com/forum/topic/1234-topic-name/?&page=5#comments
 

But somewhere they are being picked up as below as well

https://www.mysite.com/forum/topic/1234-topic-name/?page=5

I would prefer for guests all visible links for secondary pages are only 1 way with redirects to that way if not logged in. This may be by design as well.

[AlexWebsites]

Turns out this was already recommended:

 

[Gauravk]

While exploring every nook and cranny for recent major drop, I like to check with you guys that what is the best practice in current IPB setup of Search Engine Optimization section:

What all elements you guys have checked for indexing.....? OR what happen in recommending settings....?

• Status updates
• Topics
• Events
• Images
• Album
• Blog entries
• Adverts
• Markers
• Profiles
• Database records
• Pages

 

[AlexWebsites]

4 hours ago, Gauravk said:

While exploring every nook and cranny for recent major drop, I like to check with you guys that what is the best practice in current IPB setup of Search Engine Optimization section:

What all elements you guys have checked for indexing.....? OR what happen in recommending settings....?

• Status updates
• Topics
• Events
• Images
• Album
• Blog entries
• Adverts
• Markers
• Profiles
• Database records
• Pages

 

do you mean for sitemaps? if so I use automatic setting.

[Gauravk]

1 minute ago, AlexWebsites said:

do you mean for sitemaps? if so I use automatic setting.

Yes Sitemap settings

[Gauravk]

Any idea, what are the Markers in sitemap?

I like to do manual way so I know that my imp stuff is getting indexed. Switching off profile pages, as I think it went ON by mistake in past and have no use for crawling, just a bit lost with markers now ON/OFF?

[AlexWebsites]

4 minutes ago, Gauravk said:

Any idea, what are the Markers in sitemap?

I like to do manual way so I know that my imp stuff is getting indexed. Switching off profile pages, as I think it went ON by mistake in past and have no use for crawling, just a bit lost with markers now ON/OFF?

Markers is from member maps, which I would exclude. I would include profiles with content only.