Your opinion when you have time

Morocco Travel Forums
since I changed my website skin and design I noticed that my website ranking and traffic went down :(
for example when i check top search queries in google webmasters, all the positions changed to the worst, let's say even if you google go morocco my website doesn't appear in the first page, it used to be first now it's on the 6th position
Am I doing something wrong? any info i can provide so you guys can help me?

Thanks


Adam

Ok i edited the guest home page, added links to the intro like before. hope this solve the problem

[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.gomorocco.com/ - W3C Markup Validator

validate your template.


I would also remove the 'add me' link in the footer. Those SEO links are sometimes looked upon as being spam by google.

Thank you brian, the link is removed and I will work on validating my template, hopefully It's easy to do.

What are some of the major changes that you made to your homepage? What info or links did you add or remove? Did you change the title, etc?

I took off the intro page i have back now, describing the website features links to content. I didn't change the title of the website, but I added few keywords to the list.
I changed the template, beside the navbar everything else is the same.

Oh - so you removed the vBA homepage and directed it right to forumhome?

How long did you have the change of homepage in place before you switched back? And how many days after the change did you notice the loss of positioning for the keyword phrases you mentioned?

Yes, I had it for 2 weeks then switched back. I will say I noticed the drop in visitors,starting from the 3 rd week.
I added a long keyword list, is it considered a noise if you have such long meta keywords?

I would try to limit my use of keywords and not overdue it for the METAs. Since your vBA homepage and your forumhome page can contain significantly different content/links on the page, it is certainly possible to see some shifting in positioning.

If you are going to stick with the vBA page, you should try to tighten up that page even further by getting rid of as much non-essential/noise content as you can (for guests at least).

I'm not sure which will be more positive, get stick with the vba or just the forum in the main. Can you please be more specific about the non essential/noise in the guest page? the poll, sponsors, last threads? as I'm willing to do it now

Thanks

Some things I might consider on how to clean up the current vBA powered homepage:

• Get rid of the left side nav links for guests, since they are already in the horizontal tabular buttons.
• Get rid of (for guests) horizontal nav links to UserCP, Blogs, Links, Radio, Invite, Contact, & News (which is now empty), FAQ, Members, Calendar, and Donate.
• I would try scaling back the # of features tags you have to about 20 of the most popular.
• I would pay the removal options or unlink options for as many of the copyright notices as you can. Unlinking is best, but you can choose full removal as a best case scenario. Note: vBSEO provides unlinked versions. Any of them that you are allowed to remove for free, certainly do that.
• You should be rewriting your archive (if you are going to have it at all) to something other than /archive/index.php/ format.
• I think the poll can stay. It does allow you to engage your guests, and will not be too detrimental. Real noise content is something like the calendar which almost never provideds any real value, but does consume a link as well as screen real estate.
• For aesthetics, I would left align your homepage text, as IMO I feel it looks messy center aligned.
• Within the intro text, I would get rid of all links to sub-forums that do not provide exception value when a user gets there OR have anchor text that is specific to your niche or theme. For instance, you might consider your announcements area to be very important. If that is the case, then you can keep it. However, it would not be a good choice to keep purely for anchor text since announcements is far too generic. If the announcements are just site maintenance notices, etc, then I would not feature it at all.
• In general, I would try to limit the # of links to general stuff, and maximize the # of links to your niche/theme oriented sub-forums and event threads if you have great ones available that are worthy of a full-time homepage link.

Thank you for the advice. I will work on implementing them.

Hi - I'm getting lotof visitors but almost nobody register. I'm wondering if I close the forums to the public and only the registered members can access it will increase the members and how this action will affect my website SEO.

Thanks

Closing your forums to guests will cripple your SEO.

To get an increased registration rate, you should work on your general marketing. Give visitors a compelling reason to want to register. There are all kinds of strategies out there to do this if you search around. But I would definitely advise against closing off a portion of your content (small or large) since it will kill your traffic generating ability and you won't even have visitors to convert to members!

I'm thinking about removing vbadvanced and use the forums as the main page. can you please tell me if I should go ahead with it, is it any better?
thanks