vbseo, a terrible mistake? from 52.000 indexed pages to 500 in a week

I have made a terrible mistake installing vbseo on Stockerz.com - stock market simulator

I went to about 0 visitors coming from goolge in a matter of days,
Had about 52.000 mentions on there, now around 500.

Even though I try to post in my original threads, as usual the vbSEO staff ignored those.

This site has been in development for about 2 years, gets a decent amount of traffic and has never been open for registration, until a few days ago.

Did all the advise we got in the critique section, waited and day by day see the results get smaller, visitors have now dropped to zero coming from Google.

Now I am worried to uninstall it as that will confuse the spiders even more.

What to do?

you know what, you just did not understand the situation and now you panic...

why google is not visiting anymore?!... and why that much changes in your score... because google resetted their entire cache about your site when they visited your site with vbSEO again... and it takes about 30 days for google to reset the entire list of urls from your site...

remember that vbSEO is building new markups on your pages, google like them, but have to reset everything in bank to not corrupt their own links.

The problem resides on your site setup. You have 94108 threads and nearly all of them are added by RSS feed. It is highly possible that Google acts your site as a Content Scrabble site and because of this they donot pain attention to your site.

Adding content via RSS feed is OK but when you are actively creating content. Otherwise it is a very dangerous thing. I advise you to stop adding content only via RSS feed and try creating actual content where you and your users create.

Then how come I had over 52000 results for the last 2 years, and now with vbseo I have 500?
Obviously google doesnt mind the RSS, as I had a good amount of traffic and a huge amount of attention from google...

Also, the RSS is an important part of my stock simulation, the forums are not the main concern of the site.

How much traffic were you getting per day?

I fully agree with Mert on this one.

You may need to come up with a better way to get the info you need in a real time display instead of an archive of threads.

We expect the SERP count to jump around during the early phases. How much traffic were you getting per day so we can assess how significant the changes have been.

Here's a related post I just created which discusses strategies for RSS feeds. You might be interested:
RSS Feed Strategy

Can we focus on something else then RSS

Google has been indexing my site like mad, until vbseo. Obviously google doesnt have an issue with it, as for the last 2 years it indexed over 52000 pages, since vbseo it indexed 500.

I am, not sure how else to keep saying the same

Google 52000 index pages, with vbseo 500, problem vbseo

Mike - you are referring to the indexed page count which is expected to fluctuate when you install vBSEO.

If you had 50,000+ pages in the .php format, they have to get updated, purge out the junk, etc. Google, is known to fluctuate on the indexed page count. That happens, and you are not likely to get an accurate reading.

We watch this for trending information.

However, the absolutely critical metric is traffic itself. You have not yet disclosed yet how much search hits you were actually getting. Was it significant?

Our records show that you installed vBSEO yesterday. This is entirely too early to determine how your SEO is going to develop long term.

Let us know your "traffic" stats. If you were getting 1,000 hits a day, and that disappeared then I would be concerned. If you were getting 10 hits a day, and that disappeared during the update I would not be concerned.

Originally Posted by lawstudent

Can we focus on something else then RSS

Google has been indexing my site like mad, until vbseo. Obviously google doesnt have an issue with it, as for the last 2 years it indexed over 52000 pages, since vbseo it indexed 500.

I am, not sure how else to keep saying the same

Google 52000 index pages, with vbseo 500, problem vbseo

TBH I wouldn't even bother looking at the number of indexed pages. You can have 1,000,000 pages indexed, but if it is crap contents or RSS feeds then it is useless, you wont get any traffic.

A year 1/2 ago I was getting 1/2 million hits a month... now I get over 5 million, but according to Google I have no more pages indexed.

Yesterday?
This was installed on the 14th, better check if your records systems work!

The RSS is a crucial part of the stock simulation game, the main focus of the site.
My traffic is usually around 300 unique visitors a day, this dropped to according to Google analytics around 30,

I do have to admit, sign up rate jumped about 100% but that it mostly due to a Wikipedia mention someone put up.

If I check my analytics it shows ZERO traffic from google, this was around 100 to 200 before.

I am sure it is a combination of me not knowing what to do with all the settings (default) and panick at the big drop in numbers, as vbseo did do an amazing job on my other site, .... I have invested a lot of time and effort in stockerz and a lot of money... it is not just another forum, so I am overly paranoid with it.

I don't think you are paranoid. You should not have dropped from 300 to 0 in Google. That seems like a penalty. Is anything showing up in your Google Webmaster Tools.

BTW - I'll check our system. It tracked the first download in May, and the installation just a few days ago. If you installed back on the April 14th when you purchased, then our system did not pick it up.

Are you pulling the RSS from one source or multiple sources?

Did you make any other changes during this period?

Can you show us a traffic chart from installation until present so we can see if it was a gradual decline or a sharp drop off and when it occurred?

OK,
Now I am officially confused,

On Google I lost all my indexed pages, well most.
On Analytics I got this



But....

I got some traffic today from Google, not much.. but some.
So perhaps it is bouncing back?

If you guys all say that RSS is bad, then how do I exclude it? It is again, a most important feature of the stock market simulation, as it attaches news on stocks to their prices.

M

You could exclude it with your robots, but if you are seeing a trend back, you might want to wait a bit longer and see what happens.

Is the chart showing (a) all traffic, or only (b) search keywords traffic?

It's important to focus only on those search hits in the analysis.

What time range is represented in the chart?