Forum Dying Fast, Needs SEO Faster

my forum moved to a new server and the old one got deleted by proboards. since then, it's been dying by the day. i don't know what to do. i pull my hair out trying to figure out why people arent joining, we are on google front page or for some searches second page but not on the top spot like we were. probably in only another week or so we will be in serious trouble. i have to save the place while it still has enough activity to keep the current members coming back. i started a referral programme...not much has happened yet...i thought this move would be good for us. instead ive lost all my confidence about the place. its only been 2 weeks since we moved, already it is noticeable, what do i do? i got some good backlinks, but i need results faster than i am getting if i want to save my online community.

 

xRumer

 

...I know what it's like to be spammed. I wouldn't be able to do that to anyone else.

Noticed something though when I was checking other forum PR and backlinks:

http://thetvshowforum.proboards.com/

this is a 5

if you run a check on backlink watch you get REALLY weird results. There are some kind of hidden links going from over 600 apparently bot created forums {Not spam on forums, I mean forums} to this site, but the links are invisible.

 

I would say that you need to get a variety of High PR dofollow backlinks and don't just stick to only xrumer or something else.

Do all in a steady and natural way..(Dofollow is important though)

 

Try to promote it on other webmasters forum. It can help. By the way does your forum already ranking?

 

I wouldn't touch X-rumer, I'm a forum admin, I wouldn't want it happening to me I won't be a part of that. My worst competitors got to the top without it I am sure. They are a 7, at least 2 of them are 7s.

I got my site on like 3 blogrolls but I hear google doesn't like those. So...really, I have tonnes of content from over 800000 posts, yes eight hundred thousand posts, more are made every day...but that won't be true much longer the way we are going.

What if I got like one good 7 or 8 PR site linking to me? old site was 5 years old and a 3, out new site has the same content except for the latest updates. we are 2 weeks old on the new site.

My main search terms are all under a million results, except one of them. We never ranked high for that one before though, that was a holy grail I could never reach.

edit: it ranks, but it's a 0

 

You need to start building a lot of relevant backlinks to your website.

 

Your main problem is not about ranking and link building but your attractive. I would recommend hire some forum poster in a short term to make such activities in your forum first to prevent old members leaving. The ranking problem cannot got fixed that fast as you may expected.

 

The forum's a roleplaying forum, if people don't love it, they're not going to be able to really post effectively. We started out with around 220 daily active members in the move two weeks ago and have dropped already to about 195.

I swear I'll die if this place goes down because of me. I risked all I had.

 

Existing forum members ought to stick with you if they like your forum - a forum I found helpful dropped from pr3 to pr0 (due to a mixup with domain renewal) but I stuck with it (and even got it some sb backlinks !!) and it's now back at pr3.

Personally I stick with forums which I find to be either helpful or fun - the only time I left a forum was when one made all signature links invisible to search engines.

If you offer df backlinks then advertise on dp (if the mods allow) and I'm sure new people will join!!!

 

220 active to 195 isn't a huge drop ... what about new signups?

If you used to rank pos. 1 but now rank only first page then there's an improvement that can be made there.

Unfortunately you wont have the opportunity to 301 redirect each forum topic to it's counterpart on your own server ... that would have preserved most of the rankings & therefore the rankings....

 

For the most part they aer sticking with us, but we do have member churn like any forum, and there are almost no new signups coming in. That's the problem. I just want to keep the forum healthy until we get back to a higher position and can start getting more people coming in again.

The deletion was done by Proboards in retribution for our moving our stuff off their server....They don't like that.

220 to 195 seemed scary to me because it happened in 1 week.

 

We do offer link exchanges with othe forums, that's actually the main thing that got us our PR on the old board, which was a 3.

Whoops I'm sorry I didn't mean to double post!!!

 

Invite Experts to post in your forum. In any field there are well known experts. If you’ve started a forum on the subject, chances are you know who the top experts are. Chances are there is already a discussion about one of their products or theories going on in your forum. If not, start one. Then contact the expert and invite them to join in the discussion

 

use more forums for this...

 

most powerful thing is generate backlinks to similar content sites.. (no matter do-follow or No-follow)

 

I got a lot of backlinks already. It's now been exactly 2 weeks. I key in the searches like every day to check, no real change. Sometimes I see maybe it moved up a tiny bit but then it's back down. I heard it's not good to get too many backlinks at once but then how to new news articles and stuff suddenly get up there?

 

What do you mean move? That's probably the key to your problem, yet you haven't explained it.

 

Well, when i say moved, I mean it was up near the top of the second page about a week ago, now it's more down towards the bottom. Sorry if I have not explained that well.

If you mean moved as in my site itself, yes, we moved our entire site, content and all, exactly 2 weeks ago from a proboards forum to our own paid hosting. That's when all this activity dropoff began. I knew it would happen due to no more google but didn't know how bad it would be.

I hope this explains it well, let me know if you need more explanation.

 

Yes, i meant moving your entire site.
And because you did that, it's very much like starting over.

All incoming links to your old domain are lost, and so are the cached and indexed pages of your old site.
And since proboards is a third party, remote host, you probably don't have access to do 301 redirects, which worsens this problem.
All you can do at this point, is keep trying to get new inbound links to your site, regularly create xml sitemaps and submit to google, and keep encouraging your users to keep posting to the site so that new content continues to be generated.