What are we doing wrong with our International IT Forum?

[admonaut]

Hello,

I have a question for the IT User here: In addition to our successful German forum (administrator.de), we also have an English forum with the domain https://rootdb.com/ We have translated the most important German instructions and moved all previous English content from administrator.de to rootdb.com. The portal went live in early February 2025. Unfortunately, we have only had four new user registrations since then, and no one wants to ask a question or post anything on the site. The German version, which is identical to the portal software, works very well.

Although we have many IT experts, especially in the areas of security and firewalls, neither Google nor international IT users seem to like us. We are not native English speakers, but we thought we had translated everything correctly. We also ran everything through a language AI to check everything.

Perhaps someone could take a look at the site and tell us what we are doing wrong or where our mistake lies. I would be very grateful. I don't know what else to do at the moment. Thanks in advance.

Many Thanks Frank

[anenefan]

Problem - unfortunate site name / link.

It's probably among a very small handful of urls (that are active and not dubious) I have popped into a search engine like duckduckgo and get other sites first with no hit on the actual url I entered into the search bar. That is not a good thing.

Root'd comes up very prominently. Then there's software rootdb and I threw into the query - forum and IT and still getting top results for Root'd and a French support area for rootdb ... followed other rootdb support areas.

Google I tested last so it probably had enough from tracking me to the German site to throw up the right result after adding IT and forum to the query but not the url on its own where for me atm the linkedin announcement is the third result and hacker news entry today is seventh.

Since there seems to be a major project rootdb - it's also going to throw confusion to would be visitors who might have been looking for a suitable forum.

[BandButcher]

Could be anything from network to plain marketing and SEO.

I'm assuming the lack of new users is due more towards the marketing and search engine optimization of the new international site.

If a forum has very little posts to begin with or active users it may scare away new registrations. That could be the problem.

Another (personally) more glaring issue is the major differences in domain names. I would be afraid that they are not associated with one another and may distrust the international site altogether.

I'd recommend putting the English site under a "subdomain", such as:

en.administrator.de

That change should also improve your SEO I'd assume.

Cheers

[admonaut]

Thank you in advance for your reply. We have already tried the subdomain 'en.administrator.de', but Google doesn't like it when English content is hosted under a .de domain. I can also rule out the network, etc. It can't really be SEO as the administrator.de site runs on the same portal software and SEO works well there. We've checked it with tools and, apart from a few minor issues, there's not much to complain about. My concerns are more about the texts or the workflow. Maybe our German way of describing things to users is different from the international way. Maybe we need to do it differently. But how? I'd be grateful for any tips or ideas.

Would you register if you visited our website? If not, why not? We would like to know and it could help us.