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
-
.co.uk to .com domain move Dec 26th, still 40% down - do I risk moving back? (desperate)
Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyreReviews0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Subdomain and root domain
Hey Everyone, our page has multiple domains and I'm wondering how it affects search rankings today. I saw some stuff from almost a year ago, but I'm not sure if something has changed. We currently have our root domain "www.xyz.com" and started moving some pages over to a different sub-domain "web.xyz.com" because of usability and ease of adjusting content. How much will this affect our seo? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
How do yo get local SEO to show up on search results
I am looking at an example of search results that displays the image below. I wanted to have the local address to the right of my website. How do I have something like this? qGJ6EBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba0 -
Serps drop on 21st
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 Earlier i used to be on #1 and #3 page results for most of my results. But after 21st dec, my results went to 10th and 13th page of results. Is it due to latest panda update? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-16121.html If so, can you guys examine my website and provide me your suggestions please... PS: i have followed only genuine kinda link buildings, my content is 100% unique. Will be waiting for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeanAndrews
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years. According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say 'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. ' My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.0 -
Ask a Question
We use DNN and we have case studies ran from our CMS. This is so we can have them in lists by category on service/market pages and show specific ones when needed. Then there is the case study detail page, (this is where the problem exists)to where you read out the case study in full detail and see the images and story. We enter our Case Studies into the CMS and this determines which website they show, and it creates URLs from the titles. However, on the detail page, the case studies all share the same page, Case Study.aspx, and they resolve to that page with their respected URLs in place. As seen here, http://www.structural.net/case-study/1/new-marlins-stadium.aspx Because they all share the same page they are being pulled as duplicate pages. They do show in the SERPS with the right title and URL and it all looks great, but they get errors for having duplicate page content and titles. Is there a way to solve this, or is this something I should even worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0