Hello
I upgraded to mybb ver 1.8 with Flatone responsive theme some 2 months back . From that date, I am experiencing a considerable downward trend in my visitors and traffic. Any reason for this ?
mybb 1.8 greater then 1.6
This is not intended to be posted in the themes support. I changed themes and even after the traffic loss continuous
There is no major change in 1.8 to cause this, apart from a few new spam prevention measures. Some of the traffic you've lost may have been from spammers and bots, but I wouldn't expect there to be a significant downturn.
I've moved this to general support BTW.
Are you tracking your traffic via Google Analytics or some third party javascript based solution, or cPanel stats?
not necessarily a technical issue...
maybe your visitors was used to old good theme and dont like much the new look ?
(give them some survey / poll on site like - "how do you like our new look")
also consider that the ones who allready left will rather not answer.
I don't think the flatone theme would be the reason why your traffic has gone down. There are a lot of variables to be considered.
If I were to try to tackle the issue I would look at analytics. PM me your site. I'm happy to help.
Hi
Thanks all for your concerns and replies
I'm tracking it through analytics, Webmaster tools as well as our own user count, the Adsense impressions and earnings also decreased by 40% now. But what I see is the SERP positions of my pages also show a bit downward trend, but not so significant as the drop in user count.
@Euan, I agree, the spam bots numbers came down, previously 20 out of 50 users in 'who is online now?' pages were showing 'viewing no permissions page' now their count dropped to 10-12. But that is not the issue. The user registrations per day dropped by 40%.
I re-activated the Google SEO plugin after upgrading to 1.8, previously I was using the sitemap feature of the plugin with the mybb default url's . After the upgrade I mistakenly activated the SEO friendly url feature of the plugin, and kept is so for one day, later De-activated it. But Googlebot crawled the new url scheme. The de-activation resulted an increase in the number of 404 pages in my webmaster tools. Now about 75,000 pages are listed as 404, day by day the number inceases, everyday it finds pages in the new url format. I dont know how it finds the url's in the new scheme, since the scheme is de-activated 2 months ago
Do these increased number of 404 pages creates the issue ?
The increased 404s certainly won't help. It may be worthwhile re-enabling the Google SEO URLs as the old MyBB URLs will be redirected to them automatically.
(2015-10-15, 08:02 PM)Euan T Wrote: [ -> ]The increased 404s certainly won't help. It may be worthwhile re-enabling the Google SEO URLs as the old MyBB URLs will be redirected to them automatically.
I would strongly advise you to follow Euan T's advice, even if you are not a fan of SEO URLs.
First of all make sure to log in to Webmaster Tools and check if there is any manual action against your site. The large percentage of 404s won't cause this but there might be spam related action taken against you. If you find any solve them ASAP and submit the details to Google.
The increased percentage of 404s will punish your website and google might temporarily put it in a sandbox. Download a sitemap generator and upload your new sitemap to google. You should still have your recrawl "credits" for this month, use it after submitting your sitemap.
It will take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months recovering from this but you will regain your rankings. I recovered sites from much worse issues so there is no reason to panic.