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Well respected SEO Jill Whalen who runs the High Rankings Forum recently upgraded the forums to the latest version of Invision Powered board software and see said soon afterwards traffic increased 50%.
Jill explained:
Just compared the organic Google traffic which came directly to forum pages for the past 2 weeks since the new forum with the new "SEO friendly" URLs in place, and was surprised to see that the visits are up 50%.Interesting. Will see if that's just somehow because it's all new, or if it will remain that way.
I don't think anyone should be telling people that changing URLs will lead to even a temporary loss of traffic. If 301's are done correctly and the overall information architecture of a site isn't changing, no organic Google traffic should be lost. Most likely it will be gained.
Now, who knows if it is the "SEO Friendly" URLs, although keywords in URLs do help, were the main impact here if any. 50% increase is a huge increase. I wouldn't be surprised to see traffic patterns level back to where they were or dip slightly for a bit and then go back to where they were over the next couple weeks.
The cool part of this software was that it was intelligent enough to create the 301 redirects. Jill said, "this software seamlessly created all the 301's," and she said they worked.
Congrats Jill, I hope the traffic continues to climb!
Forum discussion at High Rankings Forum.
Comments:
David Iwanow
04/02/2012 12:17 pm
I had noticed a similar uplift previous and checked the redirects and they were actually using 302s so there was all the old content still in the index boosting the overall stats, check the server responses are actually 301s, but yes i've seen a big change by simply changing the URLs but never that much
Mark
04/02/2012 12:52 pm
I suspect there were many more factors in play. Pretty permalinks do help determine relevancy logically, but a software switch might have triggered many changes as well as a freshness boast somehow.
Chris
04/02/2012 03:23 pm
Sometimes new software can respond quicker resulting in more visitors staying around long enough to be counted by google analytics. So if there was a site speed improvement that could be some of it.
Joe Youngblood
04/02/2012 03:58 pm
I wouldnt use IPB until they get the update process a lot like how wordpress works it now, with one click automation. being constantly hacked by blackhatters is no fun.
Ricky Shah
04/03/2012 05:28 am
I would love to know her traffic status after 2 weeks. Was it a temporary boost or Is there any real logic behind it?
Sebastian S
04/03/2012 12:09 pm
Unfortunately I can't access the forums. I have some experience with IPB and I was wondering from what version the update was made, because there are some strange redirect chains and a lack of canonical use. We had a hard time optimizing IPB for a well positioned forum with 500k/month from Google organic. No side effects up or down.
Thomas
04/03/2012 08:27 pm
Is the traffic pretty spread out among the various forum postings or is the increase in traffic to specific pages?
Megan
04/04/2012 06:22 am
HI, No its not becz of the software, its beccz the traffic is temporary, the traffic rise is only for 1 week after that it will dip. So its not just becz of the url, but its becz suddenly there has been a rise in traffic due to the ALGO UPDATES that has happened in march around 50 search quality changes