baze22 - 8:13 pm on May 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

Is this penalized? (sure seems like it):

My site has been around for years. Busiest message board on the internet for a particular travel destination. G has indexed 75000+ pages. MSN 15000+. Last year Y had indexed 700 or so pages and didn't seem to want to go beyond that. I made pages se friendly. Yahoo over the next few months worked its way to around 15000 pages.

Problem was that they didn't use meta description only first sentance or so of text. In my case, that was a "Welcome to the message board" sentence, the same for every listing. I modified things again, putting (I know this is no no) hidden (using CSS) a copy of the first sentence of the first post before the Welcome message. This worked well so that the description in the listing actually described it. This was fine for a couple of months, then last month number of pages dropped to <200.

I figure maybe a problem with dup content(I hadn't prevented print friendly pages or other unitentional possible sources of dup content via a message board) and blocked via robot.txt. Again seemed to start to climb very slowly to 300+.

Today it shows 15.

All my content isn't message board, I have 1000 pages of unique non message board content as well.

Slurp as looked at 10000+ pages this month, down from ~45000 last month.

I still show as #1 or 2 for destination forum(s) or message board, so it's not like I'm excluded from the serps.

Even at it's best the traffic for this site from Y hasn't been stellar - it just seems like it should be better. If my site was just a cookie cutter aff site or the domain diposable, I probably wouldn't care. But this site is unique and of value to anybody looking for info on this destination.

I'd be very interested in hearing any thoughts or comments.

baze