In September 2012 I woke up and almost 80% of CrazyEngineers' traffic was gone. Overnight. We had only just recovered from a platform move, and now this. That was the worst time in the entire journey, and frankly speaking, I didn't know what to do.
I've been on both sides of Google for 20 years now. I've watched it send us new members every day without us spending a buck on marketing, and I've watched it take most of them away. Almost every time, the reason was something we did, not something Google did.
So if your members are posting and Google still isn't sending anyone, here's where I'd look. I run Jatra, so I'm not neutral about platforms. I'll tell you which problems a platform can fix and which ones it can't.
Give it time, but not forever
When I started CrazyEngineers in 2005, Google ignored us for a long time. It took about one and a half to two years before everything our members had written was indexed and search traffic started coming in. Then it kept coming. New members arrived while searching for their own problems, people who thought just like me.
A new community doesn't rank in a month. Your job in the first few months is to build content worth finding: real questions, real answers, in the words people search with. How to seed a community covers how to get there.
But time only helps if Google can actually see and trust what you publish. If it's been six months and Search Console shows almost nothing indexed, waiting longer won't fix it. Something on this list is wrong.
Google can't read what sits behind a login
This one is simple. If members have to log in to read a discussion, Google can't read it either. A private Slack, a Discord server, a WhatsApp group or a members-only space will never bring you search traffic, however good the conversations are.
That's fine if privacy is the point. Paid groups and customer-only spaces should stay private. Just don't expect Google to send you members from content it can't see. If you want both, keep most of the community public and lock only what needs locking. I wrote about how to decide in public vs private community.
Your platform decides what Google sees
I learned this one by accident. In late 2009, a year after we moved CrazyEngineers to vBulletin, I bought vBSEO, a plugin people swore by. I installed it, and within a week our traffic was up almost 40%. Daily sign-ups went from about 70 to 100 to about 150 to 180. Same content, same members. The only change was how the software presented our pages to Google.
I saw the opposite at Gumlet, where I ran growth. We launched our community on Circle in June 2022, and Google didn't index the content well. Search Console showed Google crawling a lot of non-HTML pages. We raised it with Circle, and the query went unanswered for several weeks. By then we had decided to move to Discourse. After the move, Google started indexing our pages right away. Gumlet wrote up the whole turnaround if you want the details.
Your community platform decides whether each discussion gets a clean, permanent URL, a proper title, readable HTML and a place in your sitemap. Get that wrong and good content stays invisible. If you're shortlisting platforms with search in mind, start with the best forum software for SEO.
Tip: Open one of your discussion pages, right-click and choose View Page Source. If you can't find the discussion text in there, there's a good chance Google can't find it easily either.
If your platform doesn't add structured data for discussions, the free schema markup generator has discussion forum and Q&A presets you can check against your own pages, and the schema validator shows what markup your pages already have.
Changed URLs reset your rankings
In 2011 we moved CrazyEngineers from vBulletin to XenForo. The migration itself was super smooth. XenForo's team did all the work. But the URLs changed, because vBulletin with vBSEO built them one way and XenForo built them another. Google had to recrawl the whole site and learn the new structure. Traffic dropped about 40% and stayed down for six to seven months.
I don't think I set up redirects from the old URLs. If I didn't, that was one of my biggest mistakes.
When we moved again in 2018, from XenForo to our own platform, I kept every single thread URL. Links from the XenForo days still work today. That has helped us a lot.
So if your traffic fell after a redesign, a domain change or a platform move, check this first. Every old URL should answer with a 301 redirect to its new home, not a 404 and not your homepage. The community migration guide covers how to map them. My rule is simple: never change your URL structure. That's why Jatra never changes a URL once something is published.
One plugin can flood Google with junk URLs
Back to that September 2012 morning. The forum wasn't the problem. By then our front page ran on WordPress, with the forum behind it at /community, which was a bit of a complex setup. As far as I could tell, a JavaScript error in the comments plugin on the WordPress side led Googlebot to discover at least 400,000 bad URLs, nearly all of them 404s. Google got confused by all those error pages, slowed down its crawling, and our rankings fell.
Everyone in SEO told me 404s don't matter. I think they missed what made this different: a plugin created a huge number of bad URLs in a very short time.
I removed the plugin, cleaned up what I could, resubmitted the site and waited. I had no other option. After a month or two the error count in Search Console started falling. Traffic took the better part of a year to come back.
Every add-on, widget and embed you bolt onto a community is one more thing that can go wrong where Google can see it. The fewer moving parts, the better.
Thin threads drag the good ones down
This one was our own fault. Around 2019 we had gone lenient on moderation. We let thin discussions stay up, including lots of one-line queries from students who didn't yet know how to ask a proper question. There was never a manual penalty, but after Google's updates that year, the algorithm started sending us less traffic.
Hundreds of empty threads don't just sit there quietly. They tell Google what kind of site you are.
Your job is to keep the bar up. Merge duplicates, improve titles, ask members to add detail, and remove what nobody will ever search for. It's boring work, and it matters more than any plugin.
Check your community in Search Console
Here's the order I'd go in.
- Search Google for site:yourcommunity.com. If almost nothing comes up after several months, start with the login and platform sections above.
- In Search Console, open the Pages report. Look for lots of pages marked "Crawled – currently not indexed" or "Discovered – currently not indexed". That usually points to thin content or a platform Google struggles with.
- Open Settings, then Crawl stats, and check the breakdown by file type. If HTML is a small share of what Google crawls, it's spending its time on the wrong things. That's what we saw at Gumlet.
- Look for a sudden jump in "Not found (404)" pages. A jump right after a migration means missing redirects. A jump out of nowhere means something on your site is creating bad links.
- Paste one of your best discussion URLs into the URL Inspection tool and view the crawled page. If the discussion text isn't there, your platform is the problem.
Tip: Take a screenshot of these reports today, before you change anything. You'll want the before picture.
Next steps
If the problem turns out to be your platform, read the best forum software for SEO, and if you're on Circle, the best Circle alternatives. If you're stuck in a chat app, when to move off Slack, Discord or WhatsApp is the place to start. Planning a move? Read the migration guide before you touch a single URL.
To see what Jatra does about all of this, read how Jatra makes community content discoverable. Or book a call and we'll look at your Search Console together.
