Short description about our search results drop + forum moving to subdomain question.
-
Hello,
here is our story. Our niche is mental health (psychology, psychotherapy e.t.c). Our portal has thousand of genuine articles, news section about mental health, researches, job findings for specialists, a specialized bookstore only with psychology books, the best forum in country, we thousands of active members and selfhelp topics etc.
In our country (non english), our portal has been established in 2003. Since then, for more than 15 years, we were no 1 in our country, meaning that we had the best brand name, hundreds of external authors writing unique content for our portal and hundreds of no1 keywords in google search results. Actually, we had according to webmaster tools, more than 1.000 keywords, in 1 and 2 position. (we were ranking no1 in all the best keywords).
Before 2 years, we purchased the best domain in our niche. I ll use the below example (of course, domains are not the real ones):
We had: e-pizza.com and now we have: pizza.com
We did the appropriate redirects but from day one, we had around 20-30% drop in search engines. After 6 months -which is something that google officialy mentions, we lost all "credits from the old domain.. .and at that point, we had another 20-30% drop in search results.Further more, in any google core update, we were keep dropping. Especially in last May (coronovirus update), we had another huge drop.
We do follow seo guides, we have a dedicated server, good load speed, well structured data, amp, a great presence in social media, with more than 130.000 followers, etc.
According to our investigation, we came to one only conclusion: that our forum, kills our seo (of course, noone in our team can guarantee that this is the actual reason of the uge drop in may-in coronovirus google core update).
We believe that the forum kills our seo, because it produces low quality posts by members. For example, psychopharmacology in a very active sections and we believe, google is very "sensitive" in these kind of posts and information.
So here is the question: although the forum is very very active, with thousands of new topics and posts every month, we are thinking of moving it to a subdomain, from the subfolder that now is.
This will help our domain authority to increase from 38 that is stuck 2 years now, to larger scales. We believe that althougth this forum gave a great boost to the portal, in the past 10-15 years, it somehow makes a negative impact now.If I could give more spesific details, I d say this: in all seo tools we run, the best kewwords bringing visitors to us, arent anymore, psychology and psychotherapy and mental health and this kind of top-keywords, but are mostly the ones from the forum, like: I want to proceed with a suicide, I m taking efexor or xanax and they have side effects, why i gain wieght with the antidepressants I get etc.
1. Moving our forum to subdomain, will be some kind of pain, since it is a large community, with thousands of backlinks that we somehow must handle in a proper way, also with a mobile application, things that will have to change and probably have some kind of negative impact.
Would that be according to your knowledge a correct move and our E-A-T will benefit for google, or since google will know that the subdomain is still part of the same website/portal, it will handle it somehow, the same way as it does now?
I have read hundreds of articles about forum in subdomains or in subfolders, but none of them covers a case stydy like ours, since most articles are talking about new forums and what is the best way to handle them and where is the best place to create them (in subfolder of subdomain) when from scratch.
Looking forward to your answers.
-
Thank you for your answers.
One more question: I read articles that google, when taking about E-A-T, although it treats subdomains as a separate domain, it still knows that this is still somehow connected with the main domain, so the subdomain will still negatively affect main domain rankings almost the same as having the forum in subfolder.
If that is true, then I come with the below situation:
1. The main domain wont get back its old - great rankings by removing the forum from subfolder to subdomain.
2. The forum that 15 years now is the best in country with thousands of posts and visits, it will loose it;s traffic, too.Confused!! Any opinions on that?
-
I would definitely move your forum to a subdomain. Also, since your website is in EAT niche then have to be very careful about the content that people post on your forum. I am pretty sure that you are losing traffic bc of the health-related topics on your forum. These topics are not backed by any experts, but just random members.
-
An interesting dilemma. Often, UGC like forums or reviews is considered as a boost for SEO. But it seems you have concluded that in your case, it is a detriment.
I'm not completely certain of what would be the best strategy in your case, but I suggest you might start with exploring the main reasons why the forum is hurting your rankings (assuming it is). One possibility is that the forum content might contain links to spammy sites. To combat that, you might nofollow those links which are inserted into your user generated content. Perhaps even use the new-ish rel=ugc tag whcih Google introduced (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html)
Another strategy might be to leave the UGC in place, but to make it not crawlable. For example, reading it into the page using a script from another URL which is disallowed in your robots.txt file. If I were to explore this method, I woudl probably start with some experiements on just a few pages, to measure the impact (out of caution in case the assumption that UGC is the culprit might be incorrect).
Lastly, the forum does not need to be on the same root domain as the website. Again, I'm not sure this would be a positive move or not, but you could register an entirely different domain, and even disallow crawling. Or, it could be another subdomain on your root domain, but again with disallowed crawling. If you want people to be able to find the forum, but are worried about the content being indexed, you could only allow crawling of a few key pages on it whcih are non-UGC.
But mainly, I think your challenge seems to be a very good candidate for running some experiments, rather than relying on opinions from those of us (myself included) who haven't been in your exact scenario before.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Site Migration Question
Hi Guys, I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms. Pretty much a perfect storm. Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding. She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect. However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error. I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of: DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client) Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link. I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration. We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Khoo0 -
Highly interlinking a particular page shows up in Google search results?
Hi All, As we can see the below statement from Google about internal linking: "The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/138752?hl=en So if we interlink a page highly than other pages, will it rank on search results instead of homepage? Moreover if the page have "keyword" in URL slug...like www.website.com/keyword. Thanks0 -
Javascript search results & Pagination for SEO
Hi On this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches we have javascript on the paginated pages to sort the results, the URL displayed and the URL linked to are different. e.g. The paginated pages link to for example: page2 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches#productBeginIndex:30&orderBy:5&pageView:list& The list is then sorted by javascript. Then the arrows either side of pagination link to e.g. http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=3 - this is where the rel/prev details are - done for SEO But when clicking on this arrow, the URL loaded is different again - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches#productBeginIndex:60&orderBy:5&pageView:list& I did not set this up, but I am concerned that the URL http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=3 never actually loads, but it's linked to Google can crawl it. Is this a problem? I am looking to implement a view all option. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Content Audit Questions
Hi Mozzers Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being 1. Category Page Duplications
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
e.g.
Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract") 2. Product Descriptions
Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
Item 2 Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website. I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes. Will the pages that had duplicate content recover once they possess unique content or should i expect a hard and slow climb back? The website has never receive any warnings from Google, does this mean recovery for penalties like duplicate content will be quicker Several pages rank on page 1 for fairly competitive keywords despite having duplicate content and keyword spammy content. What are the chances of shooting myself in the foot by editing this content? I know I will have to wait for google to crawl the pages before i see any reflection in the changes, but how long after google has crawled the page should I get a realistic idea of how positive the changes were? As always, thanks for you time!0 -
Subdomain or subfolder for each country
Hi all I have a great .com domain but the cctlds are not available so I plan on using the .com for all the countries and languages. What is the best approach for SEO: subdomains like wikipedia does (de.greatdomain.com) or subfolders (greatdomain.com/de)? I know this question comes up frequently on other websites but I would like to hear the Moz forum.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndersDK0 -
Duplicate content question
Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Domain changed 5 months ago still see search results on old domain
Hi, We changed our domain from coedmagazine.com to coed.com in April'13. Applied 301 redirects on all pages, submitted 'change of address' to google but we still see site:coedmagazine.com fetching 130K results on google as opposed to site:coed.com fetches 40K results. Can anybody here throw some light on what might be going wrong? [ Site runs on wordpress, hosted with wordpress as well ] thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Subdomain or Subfolder for Locations?
I have a client who is ranking #1 for every term related to "bathroom renovations (main city)". They have now started to take on dealers/franchisees in neighbouring cities, and each location would now like to be ranking for THEIR cities. Is it better to use bathcompany.com/location or location.bathcompany.com? Considerations: The site has the address and phone number of the main location listed in the header, so if we do /location you will still see the main NAP. Using /location, If someone browses beyond the location landing page, they will venture into pages that target the main city (ex. "Bath Remodelling (Main City)") Using a subdomain will mean that we will need to duplicate content such as their image gallery, and we will have to create new content for their service pages or risk duplicate content. (ex. "shower remodelling (city)") Questions By using /location they will benefit from the strength of the subdomain, while using a new location-based subdomain will this mean we will have to start from scratch in terms of domain authority / link-juice? Will the NAP in the header affect the ranking of these location pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560