slinky101 - 1:06 am on Mar 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

@1script, @tedster, @Marvin Hlavac regarding forum sites :-

Those who are seeing big drops in rankings for their forums, are you using common forum software?

I'm using IPB for both forums.

and to add to the Tedster's question, if you've experienced a drop in traffic on your forum, have you upgraded to a new version of forum software recently? A popular forum software recently released a new version, which was a major rewrite.

Well that's why it's so weird. One forum was upgraded 3 weeks ago. The other remains on the old 2.3.6 version for now, no changes for about 18 months. Both sites regardless dropped like stones traffic-wise yesterday, and the same today.

Everything is the same BUT the traffic for most of the keywords that used to rank. Very long tail still brings some traffic but it actually looks like the situation deteriorates by the hour.

Same here. Googlebot activity seems healthy, it's on the forum 24/7. Some posts cached and served after 3 or 4 hours, main keywords are just fine both on proxies and 'normal' Google searches.

The only thing that has changed seems to be the pages indexed in some of the proxies. 282k down to 34k for the larger forum. Uk specific proxies still show the 282k.

I also did a search on another large forum I visit frequently and got the same results. Everything as normal, except that some proxies are showing a huge drop in pages indexed. 583k to just 47k on some of them. Uk specific still showing 583k.

I'm no expert in caffine etc, in fact a lot of it goes over my head. I have no idea about datasets, ip's and datacentres rotating results and things like that.
I simply compared normal searches ( non-personalised), with a load of proxy one's. Ranking for main keywords were the same. However, some proxies showed an alarming drop of indexed pages. Thousands and thousands short of what I've come to regard as 'normal' for my forums anyway.

I'm usually a lurker here, but when the traffic dropped massively yesterday and I saw that 1script had reported the same results for his forums. I thought it might be significant to add that I was experiencing the same.

My larger forum is 9 years old, very large and well established in it's niche, backlinks and rankings. There have been no significant changes the last 2 years ( it's the one on the old IPB software ).
The much younger forum has been very recently upgraded, and is still finding it's 'feet' in regards rankings and activity. Like 1script..both dropped significant traffic on the same day at the same time.

What to make of that then ?