Best Of

While I don't necessarily disagree with everything that has been said here, I would like to stress, that the assumption that search engine performance is reliant on the forum software used (which has been repeated multiple times in this thread), is mostly wrong.

If you believe, that a different HTML structure or more meta tags or some kind of techy "magic sauce" can somehow improve your google ranking, you have bought into the SEO snake oil.

Sitemaps, meta tags, etc. are all a thing of the past as far as SEO goes. Major search engines do not just download your HTML source code. They execute and scan the page in a manner a human would, because that is their job.

@neptronix

That is most likely because your content is great. Choose a forum software for its usability and design not for "SEO" features.

@Gomez_Adams

It is ironic that you are taking this site as an example, which is basically an iconic HTML 1.0 era site, known for its satirical articles, which has built credibility with search engines for two decades. Why should your recently created page rank in the same way?

SEO is all about content, that is the "uncomfortable" truth.

You need good and relevant content which attracts users to earn your ranking. This requires time and knowledge about the target demographic of your community/website. This can include having a good forum structure and teaching users how to choose comprehensive discussion titles, for example. It is not something that can be automated.

Take a look at my forum: https://belajarastro.id

I created my own custom homepage with the Custom Pages plugin (download here).

To make the page a full page, you can add this code:

.MainContent {
  width: 100%;
  margin: auto;
}
.Panel-main {
  display: none;
}
.Breadcrumbs {
    display: none;
}

Hope it helps your forum to have a more attractive appearance!

Check this

https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/jsconnect-plugin

After digging deeper into this issue, I found that the statistics server itself was missing data after august 24th. The analytics requests the forum was sending was giving the error message 'Data too long for column 'LastIP' at row 1|Gdn_Database|Query|insert into GDN_RemoteSite'. Some more digging reveals that LastIP is not something sent along with the outgoing request, so I assume this is generated on the analytic server side (which makes sense).

This lead me to examine my network configuration closer, and I realized that I had IPv6 enabled on the server. And even though the forum is currently served over IPv4 only (and the hostname only resolves to a v4 address), apparently this background transmission to the analytics server happened over IPv6. And that seems to much for it to handle apparently.

I was in a position where disabling IPv6 wasn't a problem, and immediately upon disabling it, the statistics server started giving me status 200 instead of 500 on the requests. I also noticed that a bunch of data immediately populated in the graphs, although I am still missing some recent data, so I'll just keep an eye on it for now. The graph seems to be slowly populating. First up to september 8th, and a few minutes later to september 25th, so I guess the rest is forthcoming.

Of course, having to disable IPv6 is a poor workaround for many, since many servers rely on it, but I guess there might be a way to force PHP to stick to v4 one way or another. And I have no idea why it stopped working on the day it did. I've had IPv6 enabled on this server for many months, and checking my update history, there were no updates on or around that time period either. Did the analytic server DNS got updated to inlcude an IPv6 address for the domain name around this time? The time differences between me and @peterlu seems to be a bit long for DNS caching, but perhaps...