Showpost vs Permalink ... stats included...

In trying to determine if I should change our setting from "Display Permalink beside Showpost Link" to "Replace post number link with Permalink", I have followed the instructions to check "showpost.php" and
"-post" landing pages in Google Analytics. I have no pages showing up as "showpost.php" in the last 30 days, but I have 979 total visits via 623 landing pages containing "-post". Here is a snapshot of the top 25...



This is out of a total of 195,000 visits in the last 30 days.

Do you guys think I would be safe moving ahead and changing the setting?

Thanks!

I think that is overwhelming evidence to suggest that you should be replacing show post links with your Permalinks.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I think that is overwhelming evidence to suggest that you should be replacing show post links with your Permalinks.

Joe,

Can you explain why you came to this conclusion, I'm still a bit confused on this issue.

Yes, I can explain.

• He says that he's gotten no hits to any showpost page *from the search engines* in the last 30 days. They are NOT delivering any traffic.
• The 979 total visits were most likely from users on the forum.
• However, those 979 visits are about 1/2 of 1% of his total visits in 30 days.

Therefore since they deliver no traffic and get minimal clicks by the users on the forum, why bother keeping them? It's better to take the massive crawling efficiency improvement.

He cannot lose any search traffic, because showpost pages are not getting any. However, the SEO improvements can certainly set him up for more traffic to his thread pages.

Thanks Joe!

Thanks for the explanation Joe, makes sense now.

Hmmm.... Our Google indexed pages went from 489,000 first of last month to only 46,000 first of this month. I wonder if maybe this actually hurt us. I also noticed our unique visitors and registrations have dropped drastically. I think I may have really messed up.

of course you will lose indexed pages-- you took out all the show post url's.

you're looking at the wrong metrics here...

what has changed on your SEARCH REFERRALS? not uniques, not registrations... those are merely by-products, not the source metric.

Comparing the 20 days before and 20 days after the change...

Google referrals dropped from 87,000 to 80,000.
Yahoo dropped from 2,770 to 1,570.

Direct increased from 15,000 to 15,600.

I will probably be able to tell more after a few months.

you lost about 1%.... which could totally not even be related to the change. I know i sometimes fluctuate as much as 10% month to month.

IMO, this hasn't hurt you at all. Keep it like this and watch the SE referrals.

If you followed all the steps you should be fine. Keep watching the long tail stats.

Did you remember to set your sitemap to not include the showpost pages?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Did you remember to set your sitemap to not include the showpost pages?

Yes I did.

Thanks guys!

I checked our registrations for the 20 days before the change and then 20 days after, there was actually a slight increase. Must be my imagination. Uniques did drop about 10,000.

Keep a close eye on it. More important than registrations for this upgrade is total traffic.