Troubleshooting vBulletin Problems Discuss Advice on SEO'ing the site. in the vBulletinSetup Information forums; Hi all, a quick background. Our site TF2Maps.net is a community for the game Team Fortress 2. We are really the best place to go for tf2 maps, Tutorials, and ...

[djive]

Hi all, a quick background.

Our site TF2Maps.net is a community for the game Team Fortress 2. We are really the best place to go for tf2 maps, Tutorials, and resources. We avg about 12 new users a day, here are the forum statistics as of this post.

Threads: 2,138, Posts: 18,575, Members: 1,477, Active Members: 610

We get about 99% of our traffic from google, or *the 1%* other community's linking to a certain topic in our forums, or a map in our download database.

The problem i have is i have a feeling the site is Horribly SEOed. The Page Rank is "0", our google search "tf2 maps" comes up with links i would have never wanted there under "site link" and had to remove it with google_webtools.

I followed the awesome guide posted by brandon in the SEO forums, but i seem to be in the same spot.. with a bit faster forum load time =p

If anyone could quickly check it out and share some advice i would greatly appreciate it, kinda bummed. Thanks!

EDIT: Also, the other admin of the site noticed when we moved our forums TO "http://forums.tf2maps.net" FROM "http://tf2maps.net/forums" a decrease in some traffic and a BIG *down to "0" drop in Page Rank". Why is that?

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Because you changed the URL, you have lost all the backlinks and indexed pages in search engine. I hope you did 301 redirect when you changed the URL.

[djive]

Originally Posted by Yogesh Sarkar

Because you changed the URL, you have lost all the backlinks and indexed pages in search engine. I hope you did 301 redirect when you changed the URL.

the site owner changed it over, so i dont know,

[glennybee]

If you set up a 301 redirect, the PR for your previous url will eventually transfer over to the new url. Might take a few weeks but it will eventually show.

More information on 301 redirects here...

301 Redirect - How to create Redirects

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Originally Posted by glennybee

If you set up a 301 redirect, the PR for your previous url will eventually transfer over to the new url. Might take a few weeks but it will eventually show.

Actually the PR would only get updated when the next PR update happens.

[sleuth]

Don't forget PR gets updated all the time, and its effects are noticed in the current serps ( search engine results pages) , the little green bar is a different matter and is usually updated every three / four months
( on current schedule )

[Mike54]

Actually, if you're getting those kinds of traffic numbers from Google, I would let the PR numbers fall where they may. There are a lot of pretty successful sites that have PR 0, so I question its importance in the overall scheme of things.

[djive]

Thanks for all the replys guys.

Ya we did setup 301 in the .htaccess when we moved the forums to a sub domain.

Originally Posted by Mike54

Actually, if you're getting those kinds of traffic numbers from Google, I would let the PR numbers fall where they may. There are a lot of pretty successful sites that have PR 0, so I question its importance in the overall scheme of things.

Ya i have heard that more then a few times is that now a days, PR doesnt mean as much as it used it.

[djive]

Originally Posted by MaddenGods

PR really doesnt mean anything at all.

If you're getting 99% of your traffic from google though, I dont think SEO is the main concern you should focus on, its finding other sources of traffic to continue

I agree, but i also know we are ranked so well because there are only a few sites like ours.. however i know since we are badly SEOed it could be easy for us to lose the google hits.

I'm sorry to bother anyone but if you have the free time thanks plenty.

Would you mind checking the site even for 20-30 seconds and give a SEO advice change.

[valdet]

Here are few hints about your forum.

Forum frontpage:

Move your > TF2 General Mapping Discussion category to the top as it is the primary focus of your users.
Announcements and Misc category could be merged and placed on bottom

Add more keywords to your forum descriptions, because they currently look like any other default descriptions in most of the forums. Since you know your audience, make it more appealing.

Remove the Welcome to the TF2Maps.net Forums. message. You already have the Welcome header as image

Threads:

Remove forum title from the showthread template.
Disable the default vB Forumjump menu on bottom and look for an alternative one in vb.org so you can place it on navbar.
Remove the rules box completely from any templates.
These two tricks will make your links appear higher up when crawlers dig through your pages, and also make the bottom of your pages look far better..

Add a breadcrumb copy to the bottom of your posts.

More importantly h1,h2 tags are something you should take care of soon and implement them on your thread titles on navbar.

Regards,
Val.

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Originally Posted by valdet

Disable the default vB Forumjump menu on bottom and look for an alternative one in vb.org so you can place it on navbar.

Actually that is bad for SEO, unless it does not use javascript as the default menu system in vBulletin.

[valdet]

Originally Posted by Yogesh Sarkar

Actually that is bad for SEO, unless it does not use javascript as the default menu system in vBulletin.

Well the default vB forumjump menu uses only options in the dropdown and they don't have any links worth of SEO as they are all like:

(from vb.org)

<select name="f" onchange="this.form.submit();">
        <optgroup label="Site Areas">
            <option value="cp" >User Control Panel</option>
            <option value="pm" >Private Messages</option>
            <option value="subs" >Subscriptions</option>
            <option value="wol" >Who's Online</option>
            <option value="search" >Search Forums</option>
            <option value="home" >Forums Home</option>
        </optgroup>
        <optgroup label="Forums">
        <option value="1" class="fjdpth0" > News And Announcements</option>
<option value="2" class="fjdpth1" >&nbsp; &nbsp;  News and Announcements</option>
<option value="203" class="fjdpth2" >&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Mod Of The Month</option>
<option value="94" class="fjdpth2" >&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Board Of The Month</option>
<option value="26" class="fjdpth1" >&nbsp; &nbsp;  vBulletin Pre-Sales Questions</option>
<option value="92" class="fjdpth0" > Community Discussions</option>
etc.....
.
.
.
.
.

I personally think there's too much clutter in there and it might harm your Content vs. Code ratio.


A DHTML version of forumjump navbar menu provides a different layout of your links as they are all ordered better in terms of SEO.

<tr>
    <td class='vbmenu_option'><a class="nfjlink" href="http://www.mysite.com/forum/f26/">Introductions</a></td>
    <td class='vbmenu_option'><a class="nfjlink" href="http://www.mysite.com/forum/f43/">Announcements</a></td>
    <td class='vbmenu_option'><a class="nfjlink" href="http://www.mysite.com/forum/f25/">Feedback</a></td>
    <td class='vbmenu_option'><a class="nfjlink" href="http://www.mysite.com/forum/f82/">Off Topic</a></td></tr>

etc...
.
.
.
.

As you may see, this version includes links to your forums which in my view is better as you can move it higher in the page, thus giving more weight to your links.

I might be completely off the common seo standards in this, but this is my opinion and I stick to it in every one of my projects.

So far this method has not let me down, so to say..

Regards,
Val.

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Thanks Val, just installed it. However one needs to add absolute forum URL take the real benefit out of it.

[Caddyman]

Originally Posted by Yogesh Sarkar

Because you changed the URL, you have lost all the backlinks and indexed pages in search engine. I hope you did 301 redirect when you changed the URL.

This really scared me the other day when my host moved us to a newer faster server without notice (cool, but sucky, all at once)

i was getting a "no input file" error cause Zoints re-write i guess was confused and i was shook i would look all my back links, etc. I got it fixed though thank God.