Google is seeing my main pages as forum posts!

[realmaverick]

Suddenly we had a drop of 10,000 visits per day. It was a bit of a shock to say the least.

I've been looking at analytics and the Google SERP's and found that google has messages like "3 posts, by 3 people" at the top of every single one of my pages in the index.

I have latest announcements from my forum, in the sidebar. They just simple links i.e Paul has announced Google freaking drives me mad.

Not sure why that would lead Google to believe my entire site is a forum. But obviously I've gotta fix it. Are there other things I'm perhaps missing that maybe could cause Google to think my pages are forum pages?

[tedster]

This may be a completely new kind of Google difficulty - coming up because of their new interest in "real time" search - or at least, even fresher search. There's a strong echo between your problem and this thread: My site listed under "blog posts about" - it's NOT a blog [webmasterworld.com]

Does your site use RSS feeds in any way? Are you using a CMS that might also be used as a forum builder?

[realmaverick]

Hi Tedster, we do use RSS to feed our content.

We used IPB as our forum software and then hooked the main website in to it. Then about 5 months ago our coder, who's an expert with IPB, recoded the site so that it all runs from within invision, the website looks and functions exactly as it did but it give's us a backend that we can use to easily update stuff.

This has only just happened, so it could be a tweak in Googles algo and it's now seeing something it didn't before.

I'm going to work on a new template and strip out all of the references to IPB, all IPB javascript etc. As that may well be the cause.

The images all have /forum/ in the URL too, I don't know whether that maybe an issue, but it maybe worth rewriting or changing.

[realmaverick]

Just a thought. If I make the skin for the bots only. And remove the JS, comments and other code and references of IPB, will that be seen as cloaking? IMO it's not but I'd like some other view points.

[tedster]

How long has the strange indexing been going on?

I'm just fishing for ideas here. Maybe your RSS function pings Google whenver you update a regular page?

[realmaverick]

I've not noticed it before now. I found it while investigating the VERY sudden drop.

The RSS updates every couple of hours but I'm not sure whether it pings Google, I'll look in to that. Though there are many parts of the site with this abnormality, that aren't in the RSS feed.

Stranger still, the homepage which is identical to many of the pages with the abnormality, doesn't suffer the same issue. And it's reindexed daily.

I'm still working on the new skin, hoping it may help.

[tedster]

The forum posts thing might not be the cause of the traffic loss at all - even though it is a very strange anomaly. You'll want to pin down some timelines here, and also understand the traffic drop in depth and detail.

If you've got the server records of pre-crash Google traffic, look for the specific search terms that crashed and what pages they brought high volume Google traffic to in the past.