Drop in indexed pages

Hiya.

We had up to 170,000 pages indexed in Google recently (across all our sites but most were from the forums).

However we now are showing only 54,000 pages in google. We've seen a general decrease in income and traffic since installing vbSEO and was wondering if anyone has any advice on rectifying this situation.

Yes.... first couple of hints:

1) Get rid of your 'Welcome Headers' for all pages except the homepage
2) Enable the 'Rewrite vB's Archive Thread Pages' option within your vBSEO CP
3) Define the 'Define Dimension Attributes' for all your forum images and enable this option: Enable Dimension Attributes for IMG tags?
4) Use the Relevant Replacements feature to create dynamic phrases relevant to EACH page and insert them in your description box (image coming)

...more coming soon.

Juan,

I've done some checking and see that we have dropped to 767 pages in google for our forums!

Anyway - to follow up on your comments:

1. Why - what does the welcome header do that has an impact. We have always had a header even well before vbSEO

2. Our archive is a money generator - our AdSense revenue from the archive is important so we are not inclined to remove the default functionality. At present all the archive pages seemed to have been dropped from Google.

3. Again - what impact does this have?

I'm obviously keen on using vbSEO but will have to uninstall it if we don't see some massive improvement soon.

http://www.google.com/search?hs=Qdk&...et&btnG=Search

You`ve got no more than 735 vbseoed pages indexed in google. Install the sitemap hack, and make 100% sure it is working. If you see in your sitemap downloads page that they are downloaded each day, then it is working.

We installed the sitemap hack at the same time as vbSEO and our sitemap generates with roughly 150,000 pages listed in it. Google downloads the sitemap every 2 or so days whilst Yahoo downloads it every month or so.

Going from 120,000 + pages indexed in Google to 750ish is not an acceptable position.

I had the drop too, it takes a month or so to start gaining, but I can`t say I am very impressed by traffic. It`s not less than before, but not much more. There`s so many sites that are SEO optimized these days that you won`t get miracle traffic by it. I first had mod-rewrite on my urls some years back, and then it seemed like miracly struck, but now you are among many. I can`t say what`s best for you, but I would feel to be in an disadvantage by not having vbseo installed, but not much in an advantage if you see what I mean.

Concerning your implementation I crearly see you are going for quantity over quality. Meaning distributing PR to pages with poor quality. I`ve got twice as many posts that are displayed in public than what you have, but I aim for about 25000 urls in my sitemap generator. I`m sure you are trying to get memberprofiles and showposts indexed, try to exclude these in the beginning at least, so that Google picks up the important stuff as soon as possible. I would also advice you to set your forums to display threads "from beginning" as default, as to get PR for those threads later than a month (they might not even get indexed, I`m not sure).

Haakon,

I was expecting a drop. However I have done nothing more than install pretty much generic versions of vbSEO and Sitemap Generator. I'm not purposefully trying to get quantity over quality. I'm open to suggestions on configuration but i'd expect quite a few more pages to be indexed in Google. I'm perfectly happy if it were 25,000 but it's not even close to that.

We installed vbSEO on 2nd January so would have expected the drop and increase to start by now.

I see what you mean. Details aside, your page is not performing at the moment. I think I installed it in Novemember, waited two months or so to get some hundred vbseo`ed pages indexed (but my sitemap wasn`t running correctly without me knowing it). Got pretty fast up to about 12.000 indexed vbseo`ed pages after I got the sitemap to work. Then stayed on a 30.000 indexed vbseo`ed pages shelf for a month, now it is over 60000 vbseo`ed pages (somehow).

Unbelievably our results in Google have changed again.

Total results for forums.deeperblue.net in Google are now 90,000 : http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...rblue.net&meta=

Results that include vbSEO are now 20,700 : http://www.google.co.uk/search?hs=Qd...et&btnG=Search

Weird.

Some datacenters have 20.000 indexed, that seems good.

Back down to 750ish results in Google. Very bizare.

Anyone know why it might fluctuate so much?

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

2) Enable the 'Rewrite vBulletin's Archive Thread Pages' option within your vBSEO CP

Juan would you want to keep th +301 option or not?

Yes, it wont hurt keeping the 301 option.

1. Why - what does the welcome header do that has an impact. We have always had a header even well before vbSEO

2. Our archive is a money generator - our AdSense revenue from the archive is important so we are not inclined to remove the default functionality. At present all the archive pages seemed to have been dropped from Google.

3. Again - what impact does this have?

note: I am answering these questions as articles instead as I want to be as comprehensive as possible. - - - I'm done with #2, will work on #1 over the weekend...

Juan,

Cool!

It's odd but depending on where I am access Google it shows different results. This is the same computer just logged onto different networks.

It's very strange. I'm logged onto my home computer and doing a search for DeeperBlue forum pages and it's shoing 90,000 odd - however when I do a search on the work laptop here it's showing 750 odd pages. Both are going to the same URL on Google but are showing very different results.