Drop Dynamics -revert to CMPS due to poor search engine traffic

[LenB]

Please help me figure this out. I just did a Google Analytics study of "landing pages" for my site. I am concerned that Dynamics may be less efficient than CMPS and the forums themselves at bringing in search engine traffic. Prior to April (?) I used CMPS for publishing my technical articles. After that I started using Dynamics because it is soooooooooo much easier than creating a new php page each time, especially since I choose to place articles on 3 separate pages for purposes of pumping up ad impressions through increased page views. There are other things easier about Dynamics, too. Brian, both are great products.

I made a similar change with my Outdoor News stuff (short news items), dropping the use of a sub-forum for it and publishing it through Dynamics.

But...my Google analysis indicates that the older articles on CMPS pages are 5 times more likely to bring in search engine visitors. This is true of the Outdoor News stuff, too. This is pretty serious for me in advertising $'s.

At first my thoughts were that it is related to the lack of a site mapping module for Dynamics, similar to what exists for CMPS. But...when I checked just now, Google has indexed all my Dynamics content.

The only other difference I can think of is content display location. With CMPS pages, they are displayed through my site's CMPS HOME page, whereas the Dynamics content is displayed elsewhere.

Here are two URL's to demonstrate the location issue regarding articles.
The old location using CMPS
http://www.longrangehunting.com/arti...e-shooting.php

The new location using Dynamics
http://www.longrangehunting.com/cont...rosshairs-217/

Any thoughts?

[tfw2005]

Just throwing in my 2 cents...

From what I understand, and I am no expert.

Pages that have been in existence, and not changed, and are linked in from elsewhere (yours and other sites) for extended periods of time, will rank higher. If you recently switched from one system to another, you will have to rebuild your rankings from scratch. Unless you do hand done 301 redirects, sending any request for the original page to the new Dynamics equivalent. If that's done right, you can keep your ranking for existing pages, and possible the section.

There is the code to content ratio to consider, and Dynamics has a bit more code then the other page you showed. Vbulletin is overall horrible for that in general.

There is also duplicate content considerations, so any non SEF Dynamics based url, showing the same content, could lessen the value of the content shown on the page you linked to. So if you have mulitple per page options, multiple sorting options, and multiple pages on the article itself, that could decrease value. In my opinion, this includes search results linking to the article with ?searchid=XXX at the end. I do a conditional which tells engines "noindex, nofollow" on any browsecategory.php, showentry.php, or any page which has a ?searchresults=XXX on it. Plus rel=nofollow on all non standard urls.

Some have also said that the closer the content to your site root, the more valuable engines rank them. Your original was only 1 sub-folder deep. root/folder/article. Your second page shows root/folder/folder/folder/article . Even tho the article is technically the "third folder", but the page ends with a /, its defaulting to a fourth, with a "index.html/php/etc" situation according to traditional web structure. epage2.html, etc reinforces that.

Generally, I have found that my Dynamics gets picked up by google super quick, within minutes, because it considers it a blog. But after other sites put up content with the same information, long term they show up before I do in search results. Even if we posted the information first. That can be due to many things, including the layout/coding/seo of Dynamics. In fact, many times, the forum thread which houses discussion, and the first post is only the link to the Dynamics article, shows up in Google before the article does. Pre and Post VBSEO, moreso after VBSEO was installed.

There is also this issue below, which hasn't affected me in google that I can tell so far, aka seeing a sudden drop. It may have possibly overall ranked them lower from the start tho. VBSEO folks and another non-VB seo knowledgeable associate has told me this does, and can if it hasn't, eventually lead to devaluing of rankings, or complete exclusion of content because it's considered "blackhat" or a shady practice for trickery. I know it's not Brians intention to do that, but the method used is also used by manipulative folks. And it affects every single Dynamics installation.

http://www.vbadvanced.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29065

[LenB]

Pages that have been in existence, and not changed, and are linked in from elsewhere (yours and other sites) for extended periods of time, will rank higher.

They are only 6 months older on average. Plus...the stats I used in my comparison of the Outdoor News (forum location vs Dynamics location) were done back in March vs a Dynamics stats date of July. So no "aging" advantage at all.

If you recently switched from one system to another, you will have to rebuild your rankings from scratch. Unless you do hand done 301 redirects, sending any request for the original page to the new

Only new content is using Dynamics. The old content is still in the original CMPS locations.

There is also duplicate content considerations, so any non SEF Dynamics based url, showing the same content, could lessen the value of the content shown on the page you linked to. So if you have mulitple per page options, multiple sorting options, and multiple pages on the article itself, that could decrease value. In my opinion, this includes search results linking to the article with ?searchid=XXX at the end. I do a conditional which tells engines "noindex, nofollow" on any browsecategory.php, showentry.php, or any page which has a ?searchresults=XXX on it. Plus rel=nofollow on all non standard urls.

Mostly over my head but are you saying that the dupe in the browsecategory may be bad SEO in general?

Generally, I have found that my Dynamics gets picked up by google super quick, within minutes, because it considers it a blog. But after other sites put up content with the same information, long term they show up before I do in search results. Even if we posted the information first. That can be due to many things, including the layout/coding/seo of Dynamics.

My 5 Dynamics articles published a few days ago are already indexed. Could your loss of rank be due more to the competing site just being a stronger site?

There is also this issue below, which hasn't affected me in google that I can tell so far, aka seeing a sudden drop. It may have possibly overall ranked them lower from the start tho. VBSEO folks and another non-VB seo knowledgeable associate has told me this does, and can if it hasn't, eventually lead to devaluing of rankings, or complete exclusion of content because it's considered "blackhat" or a shady practice for trickery. I know it's not Brians intention to do that, but the method used is also used by manipulative folks. And it affects every single Dynamics installation.

Also not sure what that all means.

[LenB]

As an experiment I may take one of my recent Dynamics generated articles. I will dupe it onto a CMPS page, then delete from the Dynamics page and see what happens to traffic. How long do you think it would take for Google to make the adjustment?

[tfw2005]

There is really no way to tell. Depends on how often they crawl your site, and then their own updating schedule after that. If you have VBSEO, and CMPS included in your sitemaps, it should PING google and it will come look at it prob within a couple days.