SEO Issues? CMS Records Not Reaching Google / Renamed Topics Result in Duplicate Entries?

[Dreadknux]

I'm (slowly, very conservatively) looking to transition an existing Wordpress site install into a migrated Invision Community CMS/Pages setup so that it is integrated nicely with my existing forum. One of the reasons for my conservatism is potential SEO issues - I know how well my Wordpress news stories can reach within Google's search results ranking, but I am not sure whether the same would be true for Invision Community's platform (at least, on the Pages CMS side).

A couple days ago, our team and community made the following pieces of content:

• A LEGO news story, on my existing Wordpress installation,
• A topic on my Invision Community forum, about the same subject (which was renamed several times),
• and a second news story, identical to the Wordpress one, created on Invision Community CMS/Pages app, using 'Copy to Database' and pulling from the above topic.

All of these content pieces have been live and kicking for about three days. I did a quick vanity search to test the ranking/viability of all three content pieces.

As you can see above, it's a little strange.

Of course, the Wordpress story appears at the very top of the search results (which I would expect, as it currently uses the base domain and is the primary location for my website/community's news stories). Nothing weird there.

But the Invision Community Topic appears THREE times in search results, and all three items lead to the exact same topic. I can think of no reason for this happening except, perhaps Invision Community treats a renamed version of the same topic as a separate entry, and that is pushed individually to Google. This can be confusing to see, especially if all three links lead to the same place. Is there scope to fix this in a future revision of Invision Community? If a topic/content is renamed or URL slug changed, it should be considered all one piece of content in terms of SEO, right?

Another issue is that, as you can see, the Invision Community-produced news story linked above does not appear in search results at all. Obviously this is a problem for me if I am seeking to fully migrate my Wordpress over to Invision Community, as it could result in my Google results rankings absolutely tanking. I know the Invision Community news side of things is considered less important than my Wordpress from a search ranking perspective right now... but is it normal for it not to appear at all? The permissions set to my Pages database is all set to public visibility.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there some SEO-specific settings I need to consider? Or is this something that needs some refinement on Invision Community's side for future releases?

[Jim M]

If Google indexed each topic name change, it may take a little time before the redirect from the old topic name to the current name gets reflected in the index and it removes the other variations.

I would research the Pages record URL in your Google Webmaster to see why the URL has not been indexed: https://board.sonicstadium.org/news/merchandise/rumor-new-sonic-lego-sets-in-2023-r194/ . Sometimes, it just takes some time to be indexed or there may actually be an issue with that page preventing it from being indexed that you'll need to resolve.

If your main website and your forum are established areas, it may take Google a while to pick up newer areas until they get enough "juice."

[Dreadknux]

Thanks for the insights Jim. Yeah, I think the topic got renamed a couple times. I suppose it will take a while but hopefully all three search entires will be merged into one?

I’ll see what the Google Tools throw up, thanks. I did search for the url on Search Console and for some reason it says “URL is not on Google”. I’ve checked ‘request indexing’ and hopefully that may resolve it…

In your experience, do you think this is just a result of the way my site is organised currently (i.e. my Wordpress is considered the default ‘main site’ so Google crawlers might just be ignoring any ‘news’ URLs on my forum subdomain)? There isn’t anything on Invision Community’s Pages app/SEO settings that would need to be set for Google to crawl database records successfully?

EDIT: Seems like there is a ‘DNS issue’, (the exact error is “Failed: DNS server unresponsive”) which I don’t understand really as the website is live and active and other pages on the Invision Community install are indexable. I’ll investigate further - thanks again for the help.

 

Edited December 30, 2022 by Dreadknux

[Dreadknux]

Upon further inspection, it seems to be clearing DNS now but it’s giving me ‘Page isn’t Usable on Mobile’ error.

Turns out the Google Search Console / indexing tester doesn’t fully render the page on mobile, only loading 31/57 resources (including a bunch of core CSS files such as responsive.css). Which is weird because loading the URL on a mobile device using a consumer browser (Safari etc) loads all resources totally fine.

I’m guessing this has something to do with my server and needing to do some housekeeping on it to ensure the InvisionCommunity resources are loading quickly/properly… 

[Jim M]

If it is not loading those objects and keeping data/content hidden or something else, this would indeed impact index-ability. Looks like you have some investigation to do, glad we could help point in a direction 🙂 .