Old Topics & SEO

[dextrous]

Hey Guys,

We are running a board which has more than 10000 posts with a customized URL using .htaccess and all these pages are on Sitemap & Google SEO. Now some of the older topics are slightly outdated or outdated, I know we can prune these older topics after certain days. But the pruned/deleted topics will be the broken links on SEO, how do I handle these links on SEO?. Or is there a way I can archive these older topics instead of pruning or deleting?. Thanks.

For anyone who wants to see the website: [removed], also we are constantly making changes and adding more features.

[Mick]

How many are you talking about?

[dextrous]

How many are you talking about?

May be currently we want to move like 2000 topics or so and after that every week may be 100 or less. So we were exploring the database updates using automated sql script and we tested couple of topics by updating *_forums, *_topics & *_posts tables and it works except last post columns & few other that we missed. Is there any other table that we need to update it?.

Also can someone help me with the following:

• Does SEO ignores the other already indexed page and picks only from sitemap.xml?.

• If SEO holds the old indexed pages on their system, how long does it hold?. I know it looks at published date but still not sure how long it lives in their server.

Thanks.

[Mick]

You could move a few, say ten, 5 using a shadow topic in place and 5 without and see what happens I suppose.

Also can someone help me with the following

They would be questions for Google SEO.

[dextrous]

You could move a few, say ten, 5 using a shadow topic in place and 5 without and see what happens I suppose.

Also can someone help me with the following

They would be questions for Google SEO.

You mean this Shadow Topics option (as in the screen)?. What does Shadow Topics option do exactly?. Thanks.

[Mick]

No, when you use the ‘move’ option in the moderator quick tools at the bottom of the page you’ll see:

IMG_0403.jpeg

If selected a link to the moved topic is left in the original forum like this:



I’m just wondering if Google SEO recognises the moved url, a moved topic with a shadow topic has the same url so I imagine it will and therefore there’s no detriment to your SEO. It may also be ok without the shadow topic in place hence I asked you to try 5 of each.

[dextrous]

I see the shadow topic is leaving a soft link in old forum and moving to the archive forum, this may not work because of Sitemap extension will grab all the existing topics from the old forum and still retain the pages in the sitemap.xml. I think the more we think, moving the topic (with out shadow) to archive forum makes sense as long as the topic-id in the URL remains same, which in our case noticed it remains same even if the topic moves to archive forum. So wondering how can we automate the move using the sql script with out breaking the forum. We know the tables *_forum, *_posts, *_topic that impacts the move, are there any other table that we need to update?. Thanks.

[HB]

You could just delete them and use the Google Search Console to remove them from their index.

https://search.google.com/search-console/

You could also "soft delete" them by returning a 301 redirect ("Permanently Moved") if there's a reasonable, more relevant page that you'll be keeping. SEO-wise, that's the preferred solution.

[dextrous]

You could just delete them and use the Google Search Console to remove them from their index.

https://search.google.com/search-console/

You could also "soft delete" them by returning a 301 redirect ("Permanently Moved") if there's a reasonable, more relevant page that you'll be keeping. SEO-wise, that's the preferred solution.

I don't think we can delete it manually from Google SEO console there are like around 2000 pages initially and then weekly 100 or so, it might be labor intensive. Thanks for the suggestion.

[dextrous]

We cloned the database and tried to prune some topics with/without shadow as Mick suggested but using prune function just want to test, we set Auto prune freq: 1 day & Post Age: 60 days but it looks like it didn't prune anything so we updated to 45 days. Does the prune function run once a days exactly at specific time or is it mid night?. Thanks.

[Mick]

Auto prune will only be triggered when a user enters the forum even if you set it to run daily, if no one enters the forum for 5 months then the forum will not be pruned until someone enters the forum after the 5 months. The user that triggered the auto prune is then added into the Admin log so the Admin knows when the pruning took place and which user triggered it by entering the forum.

Knowledge Base - Pruning - what is it and how is it used?.

Am I missing something though? If the board you’re talking about is the one in your signature the oldest posts are around Feb 21 2024 which is ±35 days old.

[dextrous]

Yes, we noticed that the forum web page needs to be active to trigger the auto prune and the knowledge base that you referred helped us understanding as well.

My bad i kind of didn't explain fully, we cloned the db into dev just for testing our sql scripts, auto pruning & archiving logic etc. The other thing that we wanted to try on the board on my signature was to delete some of the old posts since Google is struggling to crawl the webpages and its delaying the new pages crawl since it has tons of old pages that it has not finished yet. So we decided to auto prune set 35 days yesterday so it has deleted some of the old topics, hopefully this helps Google to crawl little faster. Currently we have the page redirect for the older pages that's on Google but we are still looking for a bulk move to archive forum solution to not to mess with old google seo pages and still create new topics URL on sitemap.xml. Thanks.

[Mick]

A user has asked a similar question here viewtopic.php?p=16005865#p16005865

[dextrous]

A user has asked a similar question here viewtopic.php?p=16005865#p16005865

Thanks, I see the option. This will work for us & requires some manual effort everyday but this is great. We will be still be exploring the automated move SQL script that we can run everyday via cron job.