Indexed XenForo Member Pages - Ranking Drop

[Cameron]

I am running a XenForo forum website and I have recently experienced a ranking drop with Google. I think it's because I have been letting the member pages be crawled and indexed by Google. From what I've been reading, that's not a good thing since most of these pages are empty. I guess they'd be considered thin. Has anyone else experienced this? What should I do to get my website's rankings back?

 

[CampFireJack]

The best thing for you to do in a case like this is to log into your admin area and go to the Groups & Permissions > User Group Permissions area and then click on the Unregistered / Unconfirmed link. For the following options, choose No:

- View member lists
- View member profiles
- View attachments to posts

By doing so, you'll effectively be removing any pages that have become indexed by Google and the other search engines. When accessed after these settings are changed, the pages will return a 403 Forbidden error code. This is exactly what you want. This code will tell the search engines that these pages shouldn't be crawled or included in the index. They'll begin falling out immediately. Don't block these pages in your robots.txt file. That's a very bad move. The best thing to do is remove them fast, which is how I just described.

NOTE: Only follow these instructions if you've also unlinked these pages. You don't want to keep the links to them around your site and have them return 403 responses. That will reduce your crawl budget and your valid page count inside of Google. If unlinked, Googlebot will slowly stop crawling them over time and they'll drop from the index.

 

[KodyWallice]

There is also a bunch more that can be done to clean up XenForo in regards to its SEO. Please take a look at this post:

https://gaulard.com/forum/threads/195/

Just know that once these changes are implemented, it'll take, depending on your site size, months or even over a year to clean the site up.

 

[KodyWallice]

There is also something else to consider when setting member and attachment pages to show 403 header responses (not allowing the pages to be viewed by guests who aren't logged in). If you allow Google to crawl these pages, your crawl rate will decrease. I'm not sure why this occurs. It may be due to some quality signal. Basically, you're telling Google and the other search engines that you've got a lot of dead pages that users can't see unless they're logged in. I've heard rumors from some members on the XenForo forums that Google will eventually "give up" on crawling these pages, and that may be true, but from what I've seen, if you allow these two directories to be crawled, you're crawl rate will experience a steady decline. Some SEO professionals claim that crawl rate and crawl budget are the two most important aspects to consider for operating a healthy website. If you've got those two things, then other areas will fall into place. By this logic, you shouldn't allow these pages to be crawled to show the 403 errors. You'd be better off blocking the /members/ and /attachments/ directories in your website's robots.txt file instead. I've tried this in the past and I've seen the number of indexed pages increase.