A taste of why our site redesign is a big job...
We migrated a forum we support (https://forums.lymphoma.com) from this system to our new system. And of course one thing led to another. Besides work on how the main site communicates with the forums, other issues came up...
SEO, and Forum Traffic.
When we migrated from our current system to our new system, we instantly lost 88% of page views in Google, 83% of our traffic from Google, and 60% of our page coverage in Google. So Google showed our forums a whole lot less. As a minor consolation, the click through rate on organic traffic went up, as did our average impression on the page.
Now we upgraded the forums at the exact same time that Google changed their systems, so multiple things were going on. Even though we had proper redirects set-up to new URLs, google still dropped a lot of our pages. Now our new forums were much faster (which Google likes) and mobile friendly unlike the old ones (which Google also likes), though neither way enough to 'save us'.
After a lot of research and looking, it's become clear that Google has been downplaying (a) forums the last two years, and (b) especially content they think is old regardless of whether it is on a forum system or not.
So let's look at the forums here, at forums.arcade-museum.com, which we have not been upgraded yet. In the last 30 days, Google has decided to include an extra 2,000 pages from the main site (yeah)--the 30 days before that were flat for us. However, in the last 60 days, Google has dropped 60,000 pages from these forums from our index. It's been a dramatic downward trend for quite a while now. Google used to include all our forum pages. Now, they include only about 5% of them. So the forums are getting slaughtered by Google regardless of whether we changes systems or URLs.
Due to the loss of traffic, we have been exploring with what it takes to make Google happy. Since page speed affects both user experience and Google, we've experimented with making our pages as fast as possible. For example, for https://www.ace.com/, we've got the page to load really fast. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool consistently gives it a 96-99 (usually 97-98) out of 100 on mobile and perfect 100 on desktop. However, we've learned that these PageSpeed scores don't correlate well to Google 'Core Web Vitals' scores, especially if Core Web Vitals traffic is coming from international users.
BTW... to answer the question... making the site mobile friendly and faster isn't helping keep the forums from being slaughtered. However, once Google reached equilibrium, it doesn't seem to be deleting more pages now (nor adding any).
For people interested in web sites and SEO, it's worth noting that we are using a CDN (content delivery network) for the main arcade web site but not for many other pages and not for other sites (ie: forums.lymphoma.com or ace.com). There are reasons for each case. Beyond our basic, CDNs are great for web sites that don't have their servers tuned or are underpowered. For web sites that are tuned, CDNs provide a plus for static content (images, video), but provide a serious negative for dynamically generated web pages. The answer (which used to have more negatives than it may now) may be to separate static content (ie: images & video) onto a sub-domain. We are going to pause working on this site for a few days and maybe experiment more with CDNs and speed for international visitors on another (already rebuilt) site.
To make a long story... well... no longer that it already is... we are going to continue to migrate to the new system, and soon. And we will continue to focus on site speed and user experience. It's a long and hard process though.
Back to Google... it is clear that each site has a certain crawl budget from Google. We are also going to try and get Google to focus on areas for which it considers us an authority (ie: arcade games), and not so much on other areas. Previously, we moved the 'Chat About Almost Anything' section private, keeping it away from Google and non-logged in users. I'm now going to do the same thing for the Jokes, Laughs & Video section. They are great sections for our members, but not areas of strength for us in Google's eyes.
We migrated a forum we support (https://forums.lymphoma.com) from this system to our new system. And of course one thing led to another. Besides work on how the main site communicates with the forums, other issues came up...
SEO, and Forum Traffic.
When we migrated from our current system to our new system, we instantly lost 88% of page views in Google, 83% of our traffic from Google, and 60% of our page coverage in Google. So Google showed our forums a whole lot less. As a minor consolation, the click through rate on organic traffic went up, as did our average impression on the page.
Now we upgraded the forums at the exact same time that Google changed their systems, so multiple things were going on. Even though we had proper redirects set-up to new URLs, google still dropped a lot of our pages. Now our new forums were much faster (which Google likes) and mobile friendly unlike the old ones (which Google also likes), though neither way enough to 'save us'.
After a lot of research and looking, it's become clear that Google has been downplaying (a) forums the last two years, and (b) especially content they think is old regardless of whether it is on a forum system or not.
So let's look at the forums here, at forums.arcade-museum.com, which we have not been upgraded yet. In the last 30 days, Google has decided to include an extra 2,000 pages from the main site (yeah)--the 30 days before that were flat for us. However, in the last 60 days, Google has dropped 60,000 pages from these forums from our index. It's been a dramatic downward trend for quite a while now. Google used to include all our forum pages. Now, they include only about 5% of them. So the forums are getting slaughtered by Google regardless of whether we changes systems or URLs.
Due to the loss of traffic, we have been exploring with what it takes to make Google happy. Since page speed affects both user experience and Google, we've experimented with making our pages as fast as possible. For example, for https://www.ace.com/, we've got the page to load really fast. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool consistently gives it a 96-99 (usually 97-98) out of 100 on mobile and perfect 100 on desktop. However, we've learned that these PageSpeed scores don't correlate well to Google 'Core Web Vitals' scores, especially if Core Web Vitals traffic is coming from international users.
BTW... to answer the question... making the site mobile friendly and faster isn't helping keep the forums from being slaughtered. However, once Google reached equilibrium, it doesn't seem to be deleting more pages now (nor adding any).
For people interested in web sites and SEO, it's worth noting that we are using a CDN (content delivery network) for the main arcade web site but not for many other pages and not for other sites (ie: forums.lymphoma.com or ace.com). There are reasons for each case. Beyond our basic, CDNs are great for web sites that don't have their servers tuned or are underpowered. For web sites that are tuned, CDNs provide a plus for static content (images, video), but provide a serious negative for dynamically generated web pages. The answer (which used to have more negatives than it may now) may be to separate static content (ie: images & video) onto a sub-domain. We are going to pause working on this site for a few days and maybe experiment more with CDNs and speed for international visitors on another (already rebuilt) site.
To make a long story... well... no longer that it already is... we are going to continue to migrate to the new system, and soon. And we will continue to focus on site speed and user experience. It's a long and hard process though.
Back to Google... it is clear that each site has a certain crawl budget from Google. We are also going to try and get Google to focus on areas for which it considers us an authority (ie: arcade games), and not so much on other areas. Previously, we moved the 'Chat About Almost Anything' section private, keeping it away from Google and non-logged in users. I'm now going to do the same thing for the Jokes, Laughs & Video section. They are great sections for our members, but not areas of strength for us in Google's eyes.



