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Posted

Just designing a new forum and with the release of V5 not a long way away, is it better to have a Pages page as the homepage so that forums will be www.sitename/forums for when i upgrade to v5 or wont it matter?

Posted

It depends on what is on that Pages page.  The homepage should make it easy for users to get to content.  What content do you have outside of forums?  How much of that non-forum content is on the forum homepage?  

If your site is basically 90% forums, the forums app being the homepage makes a lot of sense.  If it's 20% of the site, maybe not so much.  

Posted

Just making the forum now so nothing at the moment but was going to use the opentype supertopics to pull articles or something to the homepage but thinking about it, the forum is going to be 90%+ of the usage so could aleways just add some custom html on the header to put something on there so probably better to have the forum as the homepage then. Cheers for the reply.

Posted (edited)

I am not sure SEO even matters anymore, since Google started redirecting all their traffic to Reddit and Quora. You might actually be a lot better off targeting those websites, come to think of it, since the that's going to be where the top search results are anyways.

Edited by Interferon
Posted

I have moved my forums from home page to a /forums/ subdirectory so that I could create a Pages home page. 

If it's a new site you're starting then I don't believe there's an SEO impact either way. 

If it's an existing forum that already has many topics that you'll have to redirect, all those redirect will impact the SEO negatively and I recommend you keep it the way it is.

Posted
On 10/5/2024 at 3:38 PM, alphamale said:

Just designing a new forum and with the release of V5 not a long way away, is it better to have a Pages page as the homepage so that forums will be www.sitename/forums for when i upgrade to v5 or wont it matter?

When we had v3, a lot of people used WordPress as a homepage and then had Invision Community Forums at /forums/
But the whole point of v4 was to make a better website suite so you could have all of the features on the same platform
v5 should be fine because we'll be able to re-arrange the content better

On 10/6/2024 at 5:54 AM, alphamale said:

Just making the forum now so nothing at the moment but was going to use the opentype supertopics to pull articles

If you put 300+ words on the home page, you're good

On 10/6/2024 at 5:54 AM, alphamale said:

the forum is going to be 90%+ of the usage so could aleways just add some custom html on the header to put something on there so probably better to have the forum as the homepage then

This gave me some 2007-2010 vibes when I had a table as an announcement box with scrollable text

On 10/6/2024 at 7:13 AM, Interferon said:

I am not sure SEO even matters anymore, since Google started redirecting all their traffic to Reddit and Quora. You might actually be a lot better off targeting those websites, come to think of it, since the that's going to be where the top search results are anyways.

SEO still matters:

I'm still fixing my ranking on Google.com after I wrote a To Do for myself which could be considered a guide for others, but I'm ranking #1 on Google Gemini

On 10/7/2024 at 6:25 AM, David N. said:

I have moved my forums from home page to a /forums/ subdirectory so that I could create a Pages home page. 

If it's a new site you're starting then I don't believe there's an SEO impact either way. 

If it's an existing forum that already has many topics that you'll have to redirect, all those redirect will impact the SEO negatively and I recommend you keep it the way it is.

Links don't break if you switch the default application from Forums to Pages. If you hosted Invision Community on public_html and your Forums were on domain.com, going to domain.com/forums/ would've opened the Forums so nothing changes. If you make a /home/ page, then domain.com and domain.com/home/ would also take you to the same place.

If you're saying that you made a public_html/forums/ subdirectory or had a previous forum on a subdirectory like public_html/community/, you could use Friendly URLs or .htaccess to redirect everything. 301 Permanent Redirects don't have a negative impact on SEO; 404 errors due to lack of redirects is what could temporarily have a negative impact your SEO.

Posted
4 hours ago, Pescao6 said:

If you're saying that you made a public_html/forums/ subdirectory or had a previous forum on a subdirectory like public_html/community/, you could use Friendly URLs or .htaccess to redirect everything. 301 Permanent Redirects don't have a negative impact on SEO;

I know that that's what is consistently being said, however that hasn't been my experience. Back in June 2022 I decided to move my entire forum from my domain.com/ to domain.com/forums/ and I immediately suffered a 30% drop in SERPS.

Posted
3 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

How long did it take to recover?

I wish I had documented this better, so that I could give you an honest answer. While it's easy to identify short-term patterns, such as making a single change and observing immediate effects on the graphs, understanding long-term results is much more challenging because of the interplay of multiple factors (potentially unknown) that may amplify or offset one another. Looking at the graphs alone it would appear that it never really recovered for me. 

As a side note, every time I read that we shouldn't focus on SEO I cringe as I can't help but think of huge companies that spend insane amounts of money on SEO to dominate SERPs with poor quality content. An obvious example would be Forbes Marketplace - but there are many others. 

https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

Posted
4 hours ago, David N. said:

Looking at the graphs alone it would appear that it never really recovered for me.

:ph34r: I would recommend that you:

  1. Go to AdminCP -> System -> Site Promotion -> Search Engine Optimization -> Friendly URLs
    a) Enable Friendly URLs
    b) Rewrite URLs
    c) Force Friendly URLs
  2. Go to AdminCP -> System -> Site Promotion -> Search Engine Optimization -> Sitemap -> Use recommended settings
  3. Go to AdminCP -> System -> Site Promotion -> Search Engine Optimization -> Crawl Management -> Invision Community Optimized
    Download the robots.txt and upload it
  4. Then go to AdminCP -> System -> Support -> Get Support -> Clear System Caches
    If you're using a CDN, clear the CDN Cache as well
  5. Go to Bing and Google Webmaster Tools
    a) Resubmit your Sitemap
    b) Resubmit your home page URL

:smile: The main things that should affect your SEO are:

  • The quality of your content and the amount of content you publish.
  • You can check on Google Trends for ideas.

:cool: Give it 24-72 hours and you should see your ranking change.

5 hours ago, Daniel F said:

How long did it take to recover?

I saw ranking changes within a few hours after applying changes. :blink:

5 hours ago, David N. said:

As a side note, every time I read that we shouldn't focus on SEO I cringe as I can't help but think of huge companies that spend insane amounts of money on SEO to dominate SERPs with poor quality content.

You can hire low quality text writers for $5 on Fiverr. :wink:

On 10/7/2024 at 12:19 AM, Marc said:

As a general rule, people tend to focus too much on what will be good for SEO, rather than what will be good for their users at times. Concentrate on the content, and google rankings will follow

I am convinced that what I know is bad SEO is also great for SEO. :laugh:

Posted
4 hours ago, Pescao6 said:

Go to AdminCP -> System -> Site Promotion -> Search Engine Optimization -> Friendly URLs
a) Enable Friendly URLs
b) Rewrite URLs
c) Force Friendly URLs

Thanks. I do not see any of these settings in my ACP?

All other settings are set up properly here. 

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