Not happy with SEO after conversion

About two months ago I converted a forum from phpBB to vB with vBseo. The site had been running 500 - 700 visitors per day but has not climbed above 150 or so since the conversion.

The previous phpBB forum was running in the subdomain forum.mydomain.org but moved it to the directory www.mydomain.org/forum

Looking for any and all feedback, things to improve, things I have missed etc.

Still running vBSEO 3.3.2

Wondering if moving out of the subdomain was a mistake.

Thanks in advance

Hello PhilH,

I would say what happen is the normal, You have changed your script and also changed your URLs, changing the scripts make Google bots re-identify your site content since the coding page is changed and the tags also changed and in additional you have new URLs since you change your forum from forum.domain to domain.com/forum, So this results is the normal results for your forum, Don't worry your results will back to the normal in the next few months
Please also note that : No one know when your results will back to the normal it's back to Google just keep posting new threads focus in your content now and leave search engines to vBSEO

I think that it you have made a very good choice to change your sub domain to '/forum'

You will be re indexed, and I am sure in the long run it will benefit your site,

Personally I try hard to make my thread and forum titles as unique as I can, as I have a crime forum I have found that if there is a case about a famous person, it is best for me to have their name as the title then maybe some description after that instead of a title like 'killer who did this crime'.

Good thread titles will make your site.

I will do a Google search to look at similar titles and make sure that I use a title that is not listed and use one that is unique!

Good luck

Thanks for the replies! I expected some traffic loss but Google has the threads indexed already. The search engines are on the site constantly yet we are losing traffic to some competing forums.

Assuming you guys visited the site do you see anything I missed in the setup?

Good tip on the titles, been doing that with new posts.

Did you implement the 404->301 tool?
404 / 301 Tool After Import Redirect on ImpEx imported forums

I planned on using that tool but the Impex process went so badly I did not want to risk running it or spending more time with the conversion. Not a negative comment about the tool, just frustrated with how poorly Impex worked.

Instead, I chose to redirect in htaccess.

That's where all your traffic went then. The 404 ->301 tool finds the old dead links and their new source and sends them to the correct desitnation.

Since impex changes ids if there are any holes (ie, if you deleted ever 1 thread, 1 user, etc, say, post 3, from that point on 1=1, 2=2, 4=3, 5=4, and so on, hence why doing an htaccess redirect alone will not work. You should consider implementing that tool asap.

I have started setting up to run that tool. In the meantime I took a look at Google webmaster tools.

The site map contains 2406 urls but only 504 are indexed. What is strange is last time I looked the numbers were slightly unnder 2400 submitted and all were indexed.

Also, quite a few not found urls have double forward slashes.
http://www.xxxxxxxx.org/forum//archi...hp/t-1467.html
http://www.xxxxxxxx.org/forum//canad...on-grants.html

Do you think something on my site is buggered?

Make sure your vboptions-> settings -> site url does not contain a trailing slash where it tells you not to include it.