Traffic is down (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

Since migrating hosts and also moving from vBulletin to Xenforo, I am sad to say that we have lost about 20% of traffic. Despite the much improved user experience, faster speed, higher levels of security and so on, Google in all their wisdom believe we are less worthy of their love. I think it has to do with the 301 redirects of incoming links, that reduces the link juice a little. I suppose from a users point of view, if they click a link on another website that points here, the redirect delays things slightly and so degrades the user experience a little. We get penalised for that.

I am hoping that the higher levels of engagement and the extra speed will over the longer term lead to more people coming back here and better signals to the Google God. If we can make this a highly attractive place to hang out and to get answers to all things Access, then surely we will grow over time.

 

[vba_php]

I would tend to think you're right, Jon. But could it be the case that google is not recognizing the SEO addresses you are now using and still have in their databases the query-string issues that we were using in the past? Or is that point totally irrelvant? I'm not a search spider so i have no idea what they do every day over there.

 

[Jon]

Before: Site A links to Access World

After: Site A links to redirect script links to Access World.

Degraded user experience and therefore slight penalty. That is my best guesstimate.

 

[Gasman]

I'd say is early days yet Jon.?

If you Google 'Bibby Gazette' my site comes out top and I get very little traffic to my site as it is only relevant to a small group of people.
I'm not up on these things but why do we need them? Surely the DNS servers are now all pointing here.?

 

[Jon]

Links provide a vote for the site. If there is a redirect between the other site and this site, when someone clicks that link, it takes them a little bit longer to reach this site. That degrades the user experience. So, we get a hit for that delay. Unless the other website updates that link, which is very unlikely, we will always have say a 95% link vote for that link, whereas before it gave like 100% voting power. DNS servers are a different issue.

e.g. they link to access-programmers.co.uk/showthreads.php=blahblah. That is a link for vBulletin. But we don't have that url anymore. So we have a database of all the previous vBulletin links and then redirects to the appropriate thread or post on this new software. Hope that makes sense.

 

[Gasman]

Ah, I understand now Jon.

Thank you.

 

[Jon]

You're welcome. So, although its not great, it was also not necessarily unexpected. There was always a risk. But this new platform seems much better. Surely, given time, we will recoup and outgrow what was here before? I sincerely hope so.

 

[pbaldy]

I was meaning to ask how traffic was affected. I wouldn't have thought of the links issue. Like Gasmain I assumed DNS would make the change of software invisible.

 

[Jon]

DNS is about domain names, so if you change host, it repoints the IP address. But if you have say access-programmers.co.uk/showthread.php?x-=5555, that is like saying 123.123.123.123/showthread.php?x-=5555. DNS takes care of the correct IP address, but what about the part afterwards? That no longer exists because we don't use vBulletin anymore. Instead, Xenforo has to create a database of all previous urls after the IP address, and redirect those to the correct imported webpage.

 

[pbaldy]

I understood your explanation earlier, I'm just saying I wouldn't have thought about it. I'm not much of a "web" guy. It made perfect sense once you explained it.

 

[vba_php]

I've never EVER understood the DNS concept, nor do I think it's even necessary, from everything I've learned about it.

 

[Jon]

From my understanding, its just a lookup table, matching ip address to a domain name. But hang on, there is all sorts of other complicated stuff about DNS that I have no idea about.

 

[Dreamweaver]

My way of thinking Jon is with the problems the old site had with connection problems and not being available at all this site will over time go even higher you just need to give the math a chance wait a month then recheck

 

[Jon]

Yes, I am hoping that too, although my timescales are like over a 1 year period. We are in the hands of the Gods/fate/simulation/probabilities, take your pick. I'm trying to cater to all here!

 

[Galaxiom]

I've never EVER understood the DNS concept, nor do I think it's even necessary, from everything I've learned about it.

If you think it is unnecessary then you haven't even learned the first thing about it.

 

[vba_php]

If you think it is unnecessary then you haven't even learned the first thing about it.

someone at godaddy told me it is the electronic equivalent of a paper phone book.

 

[Galaxiom]

someone at godaddy told me it is the electronic equivalent of a paper phone book.

I have heard that analogy before but it doesn't hold at all. Without DNS we would all have to know the current IP Address of an site we wanted to visit. Nobody would be able to find a site that moved to another server.