Decent site, lots of content, no organic traffic

9 years ago

4 months isn't a long time for a new site to build trust/authority with Google.

If you have a steady link building campaign tends to take about year to start pulling in decent organic search engine traffic.

What doesn't make sense is a 4 month old site.

60,000 posts

2,500 registered users

And you think you only see 20 users a day.

Are the 60,000 posts unique or are they copied content?

If copied you are highly unlikely to generate a decent amount of organic traffic, much more likely to be penalized by Google.

2,500 users isn't a lot unless they are active. Forums can generate tens of thousands of registered users because there's so many tools spamming the crap out of forums for links!

Sounds like a scraper forum.

BTW you can check what's indexed in Google with this search

site:domain.com

Will list everything Google has indexed.

David

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ADS Downing

9 years ago

I'd just like to point out that with 60,000 posts, say 500 words a piece, that's:

15,000 articles a month
3,750 articles a week

... and that equates to 500 articles per day.
Do you really think Google will see this as "legit"?

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nik0 Banned 9 years ago

Do you have any backlinks?

Could also be you deal with a penalty so worth it to check the history of the domain.
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- Allegrif 9 years ago
  
  The thing is, the 60k posts are legit. Of the 2.5k users, around 500 are regulars. We average around 20 registered users online online at any one time in the day. This drops to around 5-15 at non-peak times and 30+ at peak. None of the posts are copied or duplicates, they're all different.
  
  I managed to get this through Postloop for the first couple of weeks (paid posts, nobody wants to post in an empty forum. But none were duplicate, they were all bespoke replies to threads I and a couple of others posted), then dropped them and went with Facebook ads. We now average about 1k posts per day.
  
  Nothing fishy about it, it's just a website that's done better than I thought it would. I'll have to check the domain history for a penalty.
  
  We don't have a link building campaign going though, I just don't have the time. Is it worth paying for? And if so, how do you tell SEO experts from SEO devils?
  
  Thanks for the input.
  
  Thanks
  
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SEO-Dave

9 years ago

Content alone is difficult to rank, I'm afraid you need a strategy for building backlinks.

There's a tendency on forums for the content to be poorly SEO'd, not much point having 1,000s of webpages indexed with no target SERPs.

Have a look at what Google is indexing, search Google with this search

site:domain.com

The titles of your Google results are the most likely phrases you'll gain.

If your titles tend to be

I really hate it!
can someone help!!!
Looking for the answer???

That's what Google in the first instance is going to target that pages SERPs at, the title is really important.

If you titles tend to be covering potential SERPs:

How to Get Over Monday Morning Work Blues
How to find a Lost Dog?
Where Can Accountants Learn Sage?

Those are the phrases you'll likely gain.

Most forum posters don't think SEO when they write a new thread, so most of your webpages are probably never going to generate traffic.

Search Google for

Decent site, lots of content, no organic traffic
lots of content, no organic traffic
Decent site, lots of content

You find this thread. Forum thread titles are really important SEO wise.

David

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Allegrif

9 years ago

Google seems to be indexing user profiles rather than threads. Our thread titles are all very on-topic though, for example things like "A revealing (for some) look at the party 'Britain First'", and "The future of Saudi Arabia".

Obviously with it being a forum there are naturally some bad titles, but they're the minority. Is it just time I need more than anything?

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SEO-Dave

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Allegrif

Google seems to be indexing user profiles rather than threads. Our thread titles are all very on-topic though, for example things like "A revealing (for some) look at the party 'Britain First'", and "The future of Saudi Arabia".

Obviously with it being a forum there are naturally some bad titles, but they're the minority. Is it just time I need more than anything?

Without seeing the site it sounds like it's a lack of backlinks and time.

This is a 4 month old site, that's not old, you haven't worked on backlinks other than some spammy ones. You moved domains two months ago: I assumed you setup a sitewide 301 redirect, if not you are starting again from scratch 2 months ago.

Not familiar with the forum software you use, does it add a lot of internal nofollow links? If a lot of the links to threads are nofollow it will make it much harder for Google to spider the site and what little link benefit you have could be wasted (nofollow deletes link benefit).

Are sections of the site noindexed making less content indexable?

If canonical URLs are added, are they to the right URL?

There's so many things that can go wrong to make it harder for Google to rank a forum/site. Doesn't stop it ranking, means to rank you have to work harder on backlinks. Look at the Warrior Forum, it has a lot of on-site SEO mistakes (lots of internal nofollow links, some poor anchor text usage for example), but has a decent backlink profile and age on it's side (high quality, aged links for the SEO win).

David

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Allegrif

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Stalliontheme

Without seeing the site it sounds like it's a lack of backlinks and time.

This is a 4 month old site, that's not old, you haven't worked on backlinks other than some spammy ones. You moved domains two months ago: I assumed you setup a sitewide 301 redirect, if not you are starting again from scratch 2 months ago.

Not familiar with the forum software you use, does it add a lot of internal nofollow links? If a lot of the links to threads are nofollow it will make it much harder for Google to spider the site and what little link benefit you have could be wasted (nofollow deletes link benefit).

Are sections of the site noindexed making less content indexable?

If canonical URLs are added, are they to the right URL?

There's so many things that can go wrong to make it harder for Google to rank a forum/site. Doesn't stop it ranking, means to rank you have to work harder on backlinks. Look at the Warrior Forum, it has a lot of on-site SEO mistakes (lots of internal nofollow links, some poor anchor text usage for example), but has a decent backlink profile and age on it's side (high quality, aged links for the SEO win).

David

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated. I did indeed setup a sitewide 301 redirect. URL if you're interested is YouthDebates (still working on re-making the site in the root, which is Wordpress based).

As far as I'm aware the internal links are dofollow, so I guess that's on my side. Can you explain what you mean by canonical URLs and having them linked to the right URL? Just could do with a bit of clarification on that.

I registered the domain for 5 years, which I've heard is better than registering it for one year rolling. I guess it's just a waiting game now, and I'll work on some backlinks.

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SEO-Dave

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Allegrif

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated. I did indeed setup a sitewide 301 redirect. URL if you're interested is YouthDebates (still working on re-making the site in the root, which is Wordpress based).

As far as I'm aware the internal links are dofollow, so I guess that's on my side. Can you explain what you mean by canonical URLs and having them linked to the right URL? Just could do with a bit of clarification on that.

I registered the domain for 5 years, which I've heard is better than registering it for one year rolling. I guess it's just a waiting game now, and I'll work on some backlinks.

Took a quick look and does look like a combination of lack of backlinks, poorly target content (this will matter less if you build links), and the usual on-site SEO mistakes like fair number of internal nofollow links (you do have them), poorly target anchor text, badly named webpages (useless title tags).

Really poorly SEO'd basically (all the on-site stuff is easily improved).

Here's an example or two of on-site stuff you could improve.

Go look at your main forum page and imagine listing all the anchor text from the links from that page in a row on it's own.

Anchor text is important SEO wise, what does it say about your site?

Does the anchor text mostly say

Youth Politics, Politics, Elections... stuff about and related to politics.

No.

That's poor anchor text optimization.

Signup for a free Google AdWords account and use their Keyword Planner Tool (it's free to use) to check what the best SERPs are for your site and start targeting them rather than leaving it to chance that some threads will generate traffic.

UK based hey, are you involved in the Youth Parliament?

I own 2015 General Election had loads of General Election SERPs for the 2010 general election, links from the BBC and Telegraph etc.... After each of the three TV debates my server would grind to a halt due to all the traffic!

Today it's a trickle of traffic as stopped working on new content and with political sites they need new content daily. Lost most of my good backlinks over 3 years ago :-(

I pretty much started work on my politics site about this time in the political cycle and by the election was ranking high, so you probably have time to rank high before the May election.

You need to specifically target SERPs. If you want the UK General Election 2015 SERPs for example you'll need at least one page targeting them.

This Google search indicates how poorly optimised you are for those SERPs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=XYZ#...hl=en&filter=0

3 webpages found and none of them are optimized. Look at how bad the title tags are.

If you don't have a webpage about a SERP you realistically can't gain it.

David

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Allegrif

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Stalliontheme

Took a quick look and does look like a combination of lack of backlinks, poorly target content (this will matter less if you build links), and the usual on-site SEO mistakes like fair number of internal nofollow links (you do have them), poorly target anchor text, badly named webpages (useless title tags).

Really poorly SEO'd basically (all the on-site stuff is easily improved).

Here's an example or two of on-site stuff you could improve.

Go look at your main forum page and imagine listing all the anchor text from the links from that page in a row on it's own.

Anchor text is important SEO wise, what does it say about your site?

Does the anchor text mostly say

Youth Politics, Politics, Elections... stuff about and related to politics.

No.

That's poor anchor text optimization.

Signup for a free Google AdWords account and use their Keyword Planner Tool (it's free to use) to check what the best SERPs are for your site and start targeting them rather than leaving it to chance that some threads will generate traffic.

UK based hey, are you involved in the Youth Parliament?

I own 2015 General Election had loads of General Election SERPs for the 2010 general election, links from the BBC and Telegraph etc.... After each of the three TV debates my server would grind to a halt due to all the traffic!

Today it's a trickle of traffic as stopped working on new content and with political sites they need new content daily. Lost most of my good backlinks over 3 years ago :-(

I pretty much started work on my politics site about this time in the political cycle and by the election was ranking high, so you probably have time to rank high before the May election.

You need to specifically target SERPs. If you want the UK General Election 2015 SERPs for example you'll need at least one page targeting them.

This Google search indicates how poorly optimised you are for those SERPs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=XYZ#...hl=en&filter=0

3 webpages found and none of them are optimized. Look at how bad the title tags are.

If you don't have a webpage about a SERP you realistically can't gain it.

David

Thanks again. It was initially UK based, but with me living in Ireland we expanded to include Ireland. That made our .co.uk domain kind of obsolete, and we figured we may as well just expand more, so we went with .org.
They wanted $6k for .com

I think I'm just going to have to do some more reading up on the whole thing. Is there a way to change nofollow links to dofollow, and if so is that going to cause any problems in any other area?

Also, could you explain what anchor text is and how to optimise it in absolute simpleton, ten year old idiot terms?

I started this thing as a little project with a few spare quid, not really expecting it to get anywhere. We ended up with a lot of traffic from our Facebook page though after the initial Postloop expense, and now I'm just kind of learning as I'm going. In the last four months I've had a bit of a crash course in using PHP, MYSQL, CSS, and now learning about SEO. That on top of the steep learning curve of just being in charge of something like this. Always something to do, I love it.

- Alex

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SEO-Dave

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Allegrif

Thanks again. It was initially UK based, but with me living in Ireland we expanded to include Ireland. That made our .co.uk domain kind of obsolete, and we figured we may as well just expand more, so we went with .org.
They wanted $6k for .com

I think I'm just going to have to do some more reading up on the whole thing. Is there a way to change nofollow links to dofollow, and if so is that going to cause any problems in any other area?

Also, could you explain what anchor text is and how to optimise it in absolute simpleton, ten year old idiot terms?

I started this thing as a little project with a few spare quid, not really expecting it to get anywhere. We ended up with a lot of traffic from our Facebook page though after the initial Postloop expense, and now I'm just kind of learning as I'm going. In the last four months I've had a bit of a crash course in using PHP, MYSQL, CSS, and now learning about SEO. That on top of the steep learning curve of just being in charge of something like this. Always something to do, I love it.

- Alex

Running websites can be addictive.

Didn't realize you were a newb SEO wise, there's a general SEO Tutorial link in my sig which includes a tutorial about anchor text.

Anchor text is the text used for text links, the SEO tutorial link in my sig has the anchor text "SEO Tutorial 2014", which if the link didn't have a rel="nofollow" attribute would basically tell Google to rank that webpage for SERPs related to "SEO Tutorial 2014". This forum page would also get a small boost for SERPs related to that phrase as well.

Since outbound links from this forum have the nofollow attribute the link and it's anchor text doesn't exist to Google. This is why internal nofollow links can be so damaging.

To optimize anchor text is quite easy. You pretty much try to add relevant keywords/keyphrases to as many of your links as possible without going spammy.

If you link to a forum page you want ranked for "Conservative Politicians 2015" you use that text (or a derivative of that text**) as the anchor text for the link.

** It's a good idea to vary your anchor text if you can.

Use the Google AdWords Planner Tool to determine which SERPs to target.

To remove nofollow links, go through your scripts PHP code looking for nofollow (will be rel="nofollow" within link code) and remove any that's related to internal links.

Your forums sig links and links from within posts will be nofollow as well. If you remove the nofollow from those you'll be sending out link benefit to the links added by your forum users. You'll be considered a dofolow site and will almost certainly get many more registered users and posts, unfortunately they'll be link spammers.

Your choice is keep nofollowing external links which deletes the link benefit or send the link benefit out to your users which risks attracting a lot of link spammers.

If you allow dofollow links (dofollow means no rel="nofollow" code) and your users link to bad sites, your site might be penalized for linking to bad sites (nofollow protects you from this, but at the cost of deleted link benefit). You are responsible for all activity on your site, Google doesn't care if you personally added the link or a link spammer added it, if it's a bad link you added it as far as Google is concerned.

David

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Allegrif

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Stalliontheme

Running websites can be addictive.

Didn't realize you were a newb SEO wise, there's a general SEO Tutorial link in my sig which includes a tutorial about anchor text.

Anchor text is the text used for text links, the SEO tutorial link in my sig has the anchor text "SEO Tutorial 2014", which if the link didn't have a rel="nofollow" attribute would basically tell Google to rank that webpage for SERPs related to "SEO Tutorial 2014". This forum page would also get a small boost for SERPs related to that phrase as well.

Since outbound links from this forum have the nofollow attribute the link and it's anchor text doesn't exist to Google. This is why internal nofollow links can be so damaging.

To optimize anchor text is quite easy. You pretty much try to add relevant keywords/keyphrases to as many of your links as possible without going spammy.

If you link to a forum page you want ranked for "Conservative Politicians 2015" you use that text (or a derivative of that text**) as the anchor text for the link.

** It's a good idea to vary your anchor text if you can.

Use the Google AdWords Planner Tool to determine which SERPs to target.

To remove nofollow links, go through your scripts PHP code looking for nofollow (will be rel="nofollow" within link code) and remove any that's related to internal links.

Your forums sig links and links from within posts will be nofollow as well. If you remove the nofollow from those you'll be sending out link benefit to the links added by your forum users. You'll be considered a dofolow site and will almost certainly get many more registered users and posts, unfortunately they'll be link spammers.

Your choice is keep nofollowing external links which deletes the link benefit or send the link benefit out to your users which risks attracting a lot of link spammers.

If you allow dofollow links (dofollow means no rel="nofollow" code) and your users link to bad sites, your site might be penalized for linking to bad sites (nofollow protects you from this, but at the cost of deleted link benefit). You are responsible for all activity on your site, Google doesn't care if you personally added the link or a link spammer added it, if it's a bad link you added it as far as Google is concerned.

David

Thanks again, sound advice that. I've signed up for Google Webmaster Tools and done a couple of bits on there. I'll take your advice re. anchor text, and I think I'll leave the links in our forums as nofollow. Fingers crossed; and I'll keep reading up on it. It seems like potentially quite an addictive pastime actually, this whole SEO malarkey.

Thanks

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scottmacair

9 years ago

You said you changed your domain name a couple of months back - make sure you did a thorough job of redirecting links to your new domain?

In general content does not rank websites, it can be cause of ranking if people share and link to the content but content alone will not increase organic traffic. Incoming links from relevant sites and blogs will cause your rankings to increase.

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Pdomain

Banned 9 years ago

As you shifted from MyBB to XenForo, make sure that the URLs didn't change, if the URLs changed, ranking will be decided from the time it changed.

Also, changing a domain badly impact your SEO, as search engines have to re-index your content, all these 60,000 threads/posts may not be indexed in few days/week... It also gives an automated signal to Google that may lead to doubts/penalization etc. as well.

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Allegrif 9 years ago

Thanks for the reply. I checked for penalties, apparently I'm all good. I think it's just the domain change and then the software change that's stopped the organic traffic from growing. That's all settled down now anyway, so hopefully it's just a matter of time (although I understand it can be a long time).
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bertieallsorts

9 years ago

Your title tag only carries the weight of your website name "youthdebates" why have you not optimised the title for a couple of keywords in the title and build quality backlinks which would help you rank for different variations, also mix up the description with keywords aswell.

just targeting youthdebate is the problem and the fact you might be in the sandbox for new websites

its a great looking website mate, top job on that but you might want to revist those title tags (the most important part of any website)

Bertie

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awj888

9 years ago

maybe you have just analytics set up wrong? Where did all the traffic come from in the first place?

check your robots.txt maybe you are blocking something important from indexing

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Pdomain

Banned 9 years ago

OK, I said before, the URLs are changed due to installing XenForo forum software, this is the main reason.

I tried opening pages from here

https://www.google.com/search?num=10....0.oS_WO4rktGI

But no pages are opening, showing 404, this can be the biggest reason..

And see, your most of the content is indexed within last 7 days since you migrated to the new platform..... as I searched for previous one month and I am able to get approx. 150 results from your forum so how can you expect traffic if it is too new?

Hope you understand.

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strategic seo services

9 years ago

Originally Posted by Allegrif

So you guys seem to know what you're doing. I have a small start-up website dealing with youth politics. It's a Xenforo based forum; 4 months old with 60k posts, 3.5k threads, 2.5k registered members.

I monitor it with Google Analytics, and I get perhaps 150 "organic" users per day, but I know for a fact these "organic" users are actually Adwords traffic. Actual organic traffic is closer to about 20 users per day, and most of these are apparently return users. Xenforo is famous for being one of the most SEO-friendly forum softwares, and 3.5k threads is a lot of diverse content. Where am I going wrong? Does it just take a long time? We did change our domain a couple of months ago, and moved from myBB to Xenforo 2 weeks ago.

Sorry for seeming impatient, but I just feel like something isn't right. I always have robots crawling the site, but even when I do a Google search for an entire thread name, including the domain name, I can never find it. This is even when I've seen that a Google robot has just crawled that exact thread.

I did make the unforgivable mistake of buying bad backlinks a long time ago, but barely any.

Much sadness

Go easy, I'm 19 and this is my first attempt at a website. Gotta start somewhere.

To start getting organic traffic, you have to first increase your site's rankings for targeted keywords. Your chosen keywords should have a healthy search volume.

Once you have chosen the keywords you want to rank for, you need to optimize your site (on page) for those terms.

Once you have that taken care of, you need to focus on building high quality backlinks: links on high PR pages, dofollow, relevant & contextual.

Hope that helps. PM me with any questions you may have.

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Decent site, lots of content, no organic traffic

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