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Switching from Vbulletin to Wordpress - Rankings Gone

by Andrew O
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My website had been #9 in Google for a very competitive term. A month ago, I switched the site from Wordpress to a Vbulletin forum and the rankings immediately shot up to #4-6.

However, the forum wasn't working very well. It wasn't profitable and not gaining traction. So, I moved that to a /forum folder last week, and switched the main site back to a wordpress blog.

I was careful to keep things similar. The blog homepage has the same meta tags, about the same amount of content, same keyword density, but my rankings fell like a rock from #4-6 to #21 within the span of 2 days and looks to be still dropping. Ouch!

In Google Webmaster Tools basically all of the old forum pages are showing as 404 errors. On that webmaster tools 404 chart, it shot up from 0 errors to 300+. Could this be the cause? Did I maybe spook google with all the not found errors and it just needs to 'settle' before the rankings come back? Or (what I'm more afraid of) does Google simply not like my new WP blog?

I've never had experiences with anything like this and I'm wondering if anyone has advice/ideas on why this has happened and how I might be able to get back to where I was.

Thanks!

P.S. Today, after I saw all the 404s in webmaster tools, I updated my htaccess with 301 redirects for all the main forum pages. Also, I submitted sitemaps for the forum and WP blog on monday, hoping that would help Google sort things out.
#rankings #switching #vbulletin #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi Andrew,

    That would be the expected result of changing your link structure.

    Search engines do not rank websites, they rank individual web pages, or the URLs to be precise. So all your rankings are tied to the URL. If you change the URL and do not put in its' place a 301 redirect then the basis for your rankings are gone.

    Adding the 301 redirects should help to mitigate the PageRank loss.

    301 redirects - Webmaster Tools Help
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    • Profile picture of the author Andrew O
      Originally Posted by dburk View Post

      Hi Andrew,

      That would be the expected result of changing your link structure.

      Search engines do not rank websites, they rank individual web pages, or the URLs to be precise. So all your rankings are tied to the URL. If you change the URL and do not put in its' place a 301 redirect then the basis for your rankings are gone.

      Adding the 301 redirects should help to mitigate the PageRank loss.

      301 redirects - Webmaster Tools Help
      Thanks for the reply, yes I was mostly referring to the root of my domain, that was the page that has all the inbound links and great rankings. And like I said, I kept that as similar as possible. The internal pages didn't rank much anyways.

      The interesting thing is this never happened about 30 days ago when I switched from an old WP install to the forum. The rankings actually improved within a day or two.

      Originally Posted by ThatAblaze

      Yes, all the dangling links are causing your site to hemorrhage authority into 404 land. Since you're using wordpress as your main platform I suggest that you do the following:

      - Install a plugin called Redirection
      - Redirection allows you to redirect with wild cards. All you need to do is construct the correct regular expression to capture the forum urls and add a "forum/" to them.
      - Make sure your forum links back to your main domain in the header.

      Do all that and you should regain your rankings in a week.

      If you want help constructing regular expressions, PM me.
      What I did in my main htaccess is manually redirected some of the main forum pages, and then used this for all the rest, and it seems to work:

      Code:
      redirect 301 /forums http://www.URL.com/forum/forums
      Same with /threads, etc. and that seems to redirect all pages within that strucuture. Like, if I type in site.com/forums/9-Forum-Name it redirects to site.com/forum/forums/9-Forum-Name, so I'm assuming that will work for Google as well? If not, I can definitely try that plugin too (I think I've used it before).
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      • Profile picture of the author ThatAblaze
        Originally Posted by Andrew O View Post

        What I did in my main htaccess is manually redirected some of the main forum pages, and then used this for all the rest, and it seems to work:

        Code:
        redirect 301 /forums http://www.URL.com/forum/forums
        Same with /threads, etc. and that seems to redirect all pages within that strucuture. Like, if I type in site.com/forums/9-Forum-Name it redirects to site.com/forum/forums/9-Forum-Name, so I'm assuming that will work for Google as well? If not, I can definitely try that plugin too (I think I've used it before).
        You're right, if it works for you it works for Google. Even pages that look like they have no PR have some just by the virtue of being interlinked in your site, so you should take care to forward ALL links, not just the ones that seem to have a lot of PR.

        Track your 404s, users should never see a 404 by clicking on a link on your site. Each 404 lowers the quality score of your site in Google's eyes.
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        • Profile picture of the author Andrew O
          Originally Posted by ThatAblaze View Post

          You're right, if it works for you it works for Google. Even pages that look like they have no PR have some just by the virtue of being interlinked in your site, so you should take care to forward ALL links, not just the ones that seem to have a lot of PR.

          Track your 404s, users should never see a 404 by clicking on a link on your site. Each 404 lowers the quality score of your site in Google's eyes.
          Perfect, that's exactly what I thought. Thanks again for the help. Now I'm just crossing my fingers that my rankings aren't permanently damaged, or Google just doesn't like my new WP format.
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  • Profile picture of the author ThatAblaze
    Yes, all the dangling links are causing your site to hemorrhage authority into 404 land. Since you're using wordpress as your main platform I suggest that you do the following:

    - Install a plugin called Redirection
    - Redirection allows you to redirect with wild cards. All you need to do is construct the correct regular expression to capture the forum urls and add a "forum/" to them.
    - Make sure your forum links back to your main domain in the header.

    Do all that and you should regain your rankings in a week.

    If you want help constructing regular expressions, PM me.
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  • Profile picture of the author computermesh
    The 2 link structures and code on the page are going to be completely different. If I understand correctly the way Google will probably look at it is that it's a completely new site with so many changes. Remember, google crawls everything, even the code, not just the content.
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