Switched host, software, Analytics stats are 1/10th

In mid-July I switched forum software, changed host sites.

Immediately my site:Long Range Hunting stats tanked from 60K pages down to 6K.

Added vBSEO several weeks ago.

No improvement. What's wrong?

What software were you using before?

Did you use any strategies to 301 redirect your old content to the new?

It looks like the search engines basically see all of your old content as having disappeared and are re-indexing your site now.

I think my admin guy did some redirects. But nonetheless, why is it taking Google so long to re-index. There is almost no upward movement in pages indexed. Maybe 20 per day out of 60,000 present before the host, software switch.

Old was Infopop UBB Threads

Your traffic has fallen to 10% of past hits as well?

Good question. Dropped to 75% of former.

Ah - you're actually doing very good for a non-redirected transfer of more than 60,000 pages from one platform to another. Your indexed page count will grow over time. Keep building great content and get external LinkBacks whenever you can.

Your forum looks pretty good. You might consider the vBSEO skin.

My personal recommendation would be that you change your Permalinks option to the following (found in your vBSEO Control Panel - vbseocp.php):

Replace post number link with Permalink
Will replace individual showpost links with the "Permalink" link. Note: Posts will no longer be accessible individually.

Are you running our sitemap?

That helps accelerate re-indexing.

Joe, thanks. I think we are redirected. I'll find out for sure and let you know.

Should I be expecting only 10 pages per day to be added. At that rate it will be 10 years before I am back to 60K.

I will consider the Permalink change. What does it mean to have the individual posts not availble?

You were probably re-directed from your old domain to the new domain.

However, since the forum & thread URL formats on vBulletin likely do not match your original version, then you probably were not directing each individual page, to the new location for each.

You are actually doing much better than you might have thought.

You see, your previous forum software was likely dealing with thousands of duplicate, redundant, noise pages. Now with vBSEO those pages have been eliminated.

The result is that you will have *less* pages to index, but the remaining pages will be almost entirely valuable content pages.

When Googlebot and other search engines crawl your site now, they'll be finding only pages that they should actually index, and not noise pages that simply waste their time.

10 a day does seem rather slow. However, Google does go through such periods of low activity. Every webmaster experiences this at one point or another. Typically, they end up crawling significant bursts of pages within a short time frame and then leave you alone for another period of time.

Since the individual post content will appear on its corresponding thread page, it can be considered to be content duplication. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to incur a penalty. However, it does mean that you are going to unnecessarily cause Google to have to crawl thousands more pages than needed.

Increasing Google's workload, means you reduce your chances of getting a high level of *unique* content indexed, at least NOT quickly.

I'm not sure if you are using our sitemap. However, this does help customers (especially new ones) to accelerate the crawling/re-indexing process.

I'm going to attach a graphic of a quick analysis I did on your forum. It appears that you have about 9,600 pages on your forum that you really want indexed.

If you have 6K of them now, you're running at about 60% of your full index. That's not too bad.

FYI:
[HOW-TO] Remove "Powered by vBulletin" from Your Page Titles

Get that main forum page title targeted!

Joe,

Yes, vBSEO Sitemap is installed (I am the so-called webmaster assistant that did the server move and import from UBB Threads, as well as taking care of some of the other things like add-ons and a little tweaking here an' there). I didn't see a viable way to redirect the thousands of UBB Threads topics and posts to their counterparts on the new vBulletin installation with vBSEO installed. Too many redirects ain't good either, so I did a redirect to the home page, clean and simple.

There are a number of things that site could use to continue with the great start vBSEO has given, but as you know, it takes a great deal of time and attention. I am not an expert at SEO and have referred Len here for all your valuable advice.

R'gards,

Jim

I didn't see a viable way to redirect the thousands of UBB Threads topics and posts to their counterparts on the new vBulletin installation with vBSEO installed.

Actually - I'm not aware of anything available that could a complex redirect like that.

Perhaps we'll look at releasing just such an application. You see it would require some custom programming that would be running on the old domain, handling all incoming requests by making database hits on both the old and the new server, in order to throw back the correct 301 redirect header.

But - it's certainly possible. It just takes some more advanced scripting. Plain old .htaccess, as marvelous as it can be, would not be sufficient alone.

Please make sure he gets rid of "Powered by vBulletin" Jim - unless he's trying to optimize his homepage for those keywords.

Joe, you said:
I'm going to attach a graphic of a quick analysis I did on your forum. It appears that you have about 9,600 pages on your forum that you really want indexed.

I have 24,000 threads so why do you say I only can expect 9,600 pages to be indexed?

Hi Len,

Even though you have 24,000 threads - they are not all available to be crawled.

It appears that you have your default prune setting, configured to show threads created from the last 30 days only.

Is that the default, Joe, because I didn't change that to 30 days?

Jim

i beleive it is set that way in default when you create a new forum. go to the forum manager in the vb cp and change the default from 30 days to all time