Google stopped indexing several phpBB boards this month

[Natashka]

Not sure what happened, but starting wih sometime late January Google stopped indexing my phpBB. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn't index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.

My rankings of what is already indexed didn't drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. I know Google didn't ban or filter me, as it still crawls the rest of my site ok. And yes, I checked: my board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn't disply any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-Februaury than in November-December.It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has "better things to crawl". Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.

I did some research, and my other site, which also happens to be a phpBB board but on the different subject, faces the same situation. Furthermore, on my friends phpbb I see the same thing, and his board was also last cached same day as mine, on January 30.

Does anybody with phpbb experiences the same? is it a new google's trend regarding phpbb boards?

[swa66]

I don't see the same effect on my phpBB instance. Last cached on Feb 6th. Crawl rate of the entire site seems to perhaps even have increased slightly, but certainly not decreased (according to google webmastertools).

phpBB (and many other BB systems alike) has a potential of creating lots of duplicate content by having multiple URLs leading to the same information.

I do create a sitemap for them and I do try to filter out as much of the duplicate content URLs as I can in that process. Perhaps that helps, dunno.

There are probably far more parameters that determine crawl rate than I would know. Did your PR change perhaps, etc. ?

[Natashka]

thanks for your reply. No, PR didn't change, rankings didn't change. But I kept digging in the problem, and what happened on the day when it stopped crawling: I launched a new site and placed a link to it from my boards, and my friend placed the link, too. It is a good site, I worked hard on it, nothing sinister, but unfortunately I found out that this domain used to belong to somebody else in the past. They dumped this domain back in 2006 and it was available when I registered it this year, but according to the historical screenshot of that site which I managed to obtain, it was not a good site at all, one of those scraper parasite sites.

Could it be it? But that domain was not in use for 3 years! It has a new owner now, and new good content. Doesn't seem fair. But maybe it is something else, maybe just a co-incidence. I am not sure if Google penalizes for something like that, and in the form of simply stopping crawling.

[tedster]

This would be a very strong possibility. Write to Google through WebmasterTools for that site and explain the situation. Many people have had their domain's long-term "black marks" removed that way.