SEO issues with removing a forum from a site
-
I'm thinking of adding a Discourse discussion forum to one of my websites. I'm not sure if it's going to be something that works well or not for the site. So I'm thinking ahead and wondering what Google issues I could have if after a few months of having the forum, I decide to remove it. What would Google think about all the then non-existent pages it might have indexed? Would there be a simple wildcard redirect I could do in htaccess that would satisfy that? Or some other thing I should do?
-
Hello bizzer,
1. I dont know... it's up to you! Maybe you prefer to start no indexing the forum, check if your users like it, and then start indexing it after a while. In my opinion, create the forum, add the "no index" tag, check if users like it and wait for some results,... and if you decide to keep it, then change the "no index" tag, and do everything necessary to have it SEO-friendly (probably Discourse forums are already SEO-friendly).
2. I answered you too fast (I was in a rush), sorry. For sure, the best option is going to GWT and delete your indexed URLs. But the other option may work too!
Luis
-
Thank you Luis. Further questions:
1. You mention "if I don't want to index the forum page." Would it be a better idea to not even index them?
2. I'm familiar with and have used the disavow page. Isn't that just for disavowing inbound links from other sites?
-
Hello bizzer,
No problem at all if you want to remove the forum pages after a few months. Yes, you can add a 301 redirect (using htaccess why not!) and send all the forum visitors to your homepage (or a specific landing page explaining the forum is not yet available). If you don't want to index the forum pages, remember to use the meta robots in the HEAD section of all your forum pages. Here you have more information: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
If you finally decide to index the forum pages, and afte a few months you decide to stop that, then you can say Google to disavow those links using this tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main
Hope this helps!
Luis
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
SEO issues with Magento
Hi Everyone, We use Magento CMS for our site and we are having a frustrating time resolving our SEO issues. The site was very poorly managed in years past and in the past year I have redesigned and cleaned up many things. However we are recently having trouble with indexing and keyword ranking. Issue #1: Our main keyword ranking has dropped quite a bit while our other less important keywords have steadily risen. I suspect a very strict robots.txt implemented back in early January may have been the culprit. We have since been modifying it with out much luck. Many of our pages are still blocked. 12/05/12 : ranked 12th 1/09/13: ranked 19th 1/16/13: ranked 35th Now: out of top 50 (52nd) Issue #2: Not a single image is being indexed. We are 0 for 582 according to Webmaster tools. Not sure why... Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated as I have great determination and interest in learning the correct way to fix/do this. Site: www.scojo.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t_parrish0 -
Help diagnosing a complex SEO issue
Good evening SEOMoz. A series events, in close succession are making it somewhat difficult for me to diagnose a cause of fluctuations in traffic. Please excuse some of the stupid moves I made, but desperation got the better of me. One of my most beloved websites was hit by Panda on January 18th. Pretty sure it was due to a CMS bug that is now fixed. The website site started to show great signs of recovery from April 19th - Panda 3.5. I'm going to be as explicit as possible with the traffic for the days that follow. Traffic was stable previously. April 20th +10%. April 21st +5%. April 22nd +5%. (half way recovered, also the first real fluctuation since the site was hit in Jan). Due to the looming over-optimisation penalty, on the 22nd I changed the titles to unoptimise them a little. (fear is a dangerous thing at times). April 23rd -10%. April 24th -10% April 25th onwards, pretty much levelled out. The websites I've seen hit by Penguin, lost around 40% of their traffic, very steeply on 24th and 25th April. So the drops aren't in keeping with my experience of Penguin. But they do coincide perfectly with the massive site-wide title change. I've haven't read anything definitive about a penalty for changing titles too often, but for obvious reasons, it makes sense. The drop seems terribly soon after changing titles, but the site is very heavily indexed. It's also worth mentioning that I did changed the titles BACK, incase it was purely the fact the titles had been slightly de-optimised, that caused the drop. I waited until May 5th. This had no positive nor negative effect. It's a lot to take in but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm feeling a little bamboozled looking at all the figures. There was of course the above the fold update on the 19th Jan, but lets ignore that as we've only ever had a max 1 ad per page, most pages have none.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
One page wordpress site - what are the steps for SEO
Hello, I am launching 5 sites with keyword exact domains. I am developing the sites on wordpress as one page sales funnel sites. What do I need to do to optimize my sites? Really appreciate any bullet points or directions. Tks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmaher0 -
Breadcrumb Trail for SEO?
Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with and would like some other professional feedback. Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Breadcrumb Trail They have asked us to implement a Breadcrumb trail on every page, where the final page is the only H1 Tag. Are breadcrumb trials important for SEO? (I know they are helpful for Users, but SEO) Are they important for Search Engines to track back for structure. Any thoughts about them? Similar question asked in February : http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trupanion1