Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For years the site has ranked well for thousands of searches, with fresh content was added weekly. PR5 homepage, a few hundred interior pages ranging from PR1-PR5. In the last month or so, the site has completely tanked in the Google SERPs: the homepage dropped to PR4, some interior pages have dropped from PR4 to PR0 or even grey barred, and a few main pages have completely vanished from Google. The forum has at least 15,000 topics with close to 300,000 posts, the topics had previously ranked well but have also tanked horribly.
I use white hat SEO. Perhaps Google has focused too much on the forum (with countless members linking to their own sites or a variety of file-sharing sites). Or, it could be related to the site being hacked recently, it took me a few weeks to notice my bandwidth was getting hammered and I was getting strange referrals because of some hidden folders with < adult content > on my server (something that was happening to any of my client sites that also had MySQL driven programs).
I'm concerned because this site accounts for half of my Adsense revenue, and in the last month site traffic has decreased by over half, and my earnings have also decreased proportionally. I've never had a site so old and established drop so suddenly, I'm wondering if I should block Google's robots from the forum to see if that makes a difference.
[edited by: tedster at 5:44 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
Or, it could be related to the site being hacked recently, it took me a few weeks
I would say this is the answer your looking for. make sure the site is cleaned all holes are closed and do a reinclusion request.
Couple weeks with a hack is a long time and most likely the Gbot flagged the site as adult thus removing it or putting it in the adult filter to remove it from the index.
I'm wondering if I should block Google's robotsI would say this was a bad move as the forum most likley established the site removing it is in my opinion is gonna dig the hole even deeper.
Might be a very good idea to add "no follows" to all those out going links.
Make sure there isn't a trace of the hack left and resubmit the site.
[edited by: tedster at 5:09 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
do a reinclusion request.
How do you do this?
Couple weeks with a hack is a long time and most likely the Gbot flagged the site as adult thus removing it or putting it in the adult filter to remove it from the index.
This raises a very interesting question. One section of the site's forum is for an adult audience only, where members have taken to posting links to file sharing sites where they have uploaded adult movies. There are about 1,000 threads like this, but they date back to over two years ago. A significant amount of traffic to the forum was from people doing searches on Google that were related to specific threads, over 150,000 views for some threads with only a single post.
Could it be that this section of the forum is hurting the site as a whole?
[edited by: tedster at 5:44 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
But if possible you might want to keep the bot from spidering this part of the forum if possible.
The reinclusion how to [google.com...]
[edited by: tedster at 5:08 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
