Site disappeared from Google around December 10, 2007

As many of you are aware of there was a minor update from google on last Thursday and i'm one of those webmasters hit by that.
LAst Friday I observed a massive drop for my vBulltin forum's Google Index. I dropped from 316K indexed pages to 116K. My site is having a 90% traffic from Google alone, which is gone now. Alexa rank dropped from 40k to N/A. So do adsense earnings. A few points:
1. A search for the title of my forums returns pages from RSS indexing sites like boxxet and few pages from technorati
2. inurl:my_forum.com : Six results along with the Omitted results text. Clicking on it gives 127K pages.
3. site:my_forum.com : Flatuating from 108 K to 148K.
4. The main keyphrase I ranked in the top 10 : Now not in the first 15 result pages.
I'm waiting and watching closely. A few things I suspect:
1. Recent server change and a few hours of downtime.
2. High server load and thus very slow page loads in the last two weeks due to the import of other sites to the server.
3. Corrupted sitemap gz files due to a bug in the vBSEO sitemap generator. Fixed now.
Googlebot and for the first time Yahoobot is spidering my forum like mad now. 4-10 hits /second from googlebot. Hmm.. I dunno what's happening.


We are discussing it in WebamsterWorld and the most agreed conclusion is it's penality to the paid link policy change.

Site disappeared from Google around December 10, 2007

I didn't have any paid link backs but i'm sweeping the web for any suspicious link backs to my site and removing them. I made some changes in vBSEO config like No footer archive links, No follow for show posts and exluded member profiles and show post links fro the sitemap.


Any other vBSEO users noticed any changes in serps since last week?

How much down time did you have?

Also - what do you mean by "import of other sites to the server"?

How much down time did you have?

Close to 1 day. :(

Also - what do you mean by "import of other sites to the server"?

Restoring cpanel backup of other domains hosted in my server.

Any changes with this?

did you solve this problem?

pretty much same experience here; traffic tripled going from June to July, August was also high, but now google actually hides results for my site?

I have about 60.000 pages indexed in the forums: site:madshrimps.be/vbulletin - Google Search

weird things is this, I created a thread related to "Nehalem Bloomfield @ 2.93Ghz does SuperPi 1M in 13.969"

with those exact keywords the VBSEO address is Nehalem Bloomfield @ 2.93Ghz does SuperPi 1M in 13.969 - Madshrimps Forum Madness

all fine and dandy, that page pops up if you search in google using the site:madshrimps.be query: site:madshrimps.be "Nehalem Bloomfield @ 2.93Ghz does SuperPi 1M in 13.969" - Google Search

now see what happens if you remove the site:madshrimps.be
"Nehalem Bloomfield @ 2.93Ghz does SuperPi 1M in 13.969" - Google Search

gone; it's not listed there, Google is hiding the result, this page and thousands of others are now hidden from the search results :(
have no idea why

NEW pages created in the last 3 days are indexed and listed without issue! weird weird http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ST...weak+Guide%22& (4th result)

So what happened to your traffic levels?

site:madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f37 - Google Search



this section can't reach the 100 page .. most of my section in my site have this problem and i didn't know why !! i think now most of sites who have traffic drop have the same problem

Could vBSEO team answer

That is a Google interface issue. It's not related to your SEO if the report a higher # of results, and display less.

But why all the sites who have traffic drop are having this problem ?
Thanks for your answer Joe .

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

So what happened to your traffic levels?

they are back at pre-July levels, so the boost in traffic was temporary... now only latest content is visible in google :(