My site search created links to bad neighborhoods

[proboscis]

I have been slowly losing traffic, each week it's just a little bit lower than the week before and it's been going on for months.

So I started trying to find anything wrong and I found that when a user searches my site using a program I installed, a search results page is created and many of these results pages were being indexed by google so I used robots.txt to block those pages and I removed all the pages with the url removal tool. At first I was just thinking duplicate blocks of content were being created...

Now, a few days later I am realizing that I never fully understood how my search script was working. Apparently if you enter a url it automatically creates a link to that url on the results page, and I can see in my usage statistics that dozens of urls to <bad neighborhoods> have been entered - but I can't check to see if those results pages were indexed because I already removed all those pages.

So, is it likely that this is my problem?

[edited by: tedster at 12:36 am (utc) on June 17, 2008]

[tedster]

That certainly can cause a problem - you end up hosting a bunch of links to sites that you really don't want to link to. How long has it been since your fix?

[proboscis]

I used the url removal tool on the 12th but there are no changes in the results, in fact I am still slipping each day.

Maybe it takes more than a few days to see any changes or there is some other problem...

Should I completely remove the search program that added the unwanted links and make a reconsideration request?