Serious drop of referrals from Google - I know the cause

... but not the solution.

I'm wondering if any of you guys can hep me out with this mess. I operate a forum with PR5, 160k posts, listed in DMOZ and Yahoo. Everything was going great, until I made a big mistake. I changed the default cut-off date for threads from "Last Month" to "From the beginning" AND installed the vBa Gallery all on the same day. So all of a sudden, Google could see about 3x more pages and this caused a serious drop in rankings. The next day, I had 2x less referrals than before and never recovered. On the contrary. About half a year ago, I had 3800 referrals per day from Google. Three months ago, I had 1700 referrals, and the last month, I had only 1200 referrals. I've tried changing many things (like setting the cut-off date back), but it just keeps getting worse. More and more pages are in the supplemental database.

Have you ever experienced a similar situation? What could I do to repair the rankings?

Sounds like you're being hit by Google 'Jagger' update. Big changes to the algorythm and it looks like it's bad news for SEO sites. Wait a while, at least a week or two, to see how things develop. Some sites are reporting a drop from more than 10k Google referrals each day for the past few years, to virtually nothing over the last few days.

Agreed -- wait for the effects of the update to settle. Watch for what other people are reporting, and go from there.

This happened half a year ago so it's not Jagger.

@PageUp: Don't change your cut-off-date again. Google most likely flagged you for the huge jump in content. Now, you need to show stability over time.

Q. Are you a current vBSEO user?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

@PageUp: Don't change your cut-off-date again. Google most likely flagged you for the huge jump in content. Now, you need to show stability over time.

Q. Are you a current vBSEO user?

Yes, he has recently (i believe) installed vBSEO on a test forum at least.

Yes, bought is yesterday.

I certainly hope the new static URLs will help. Would you suggest to set 301 redirects from the old pages or not? As mentioned, a lot of them is in the supplemental database, so I'm afraid that the new pages will share the same faith.

I remember that when I upgraded from phpBB a year ago, I didn't set up any redirects, but my Google rankings went up anyway. Still have those old phpBB pages in the supplemental index though.

@PageUp:

You definitely need the 301 redirects in place. It is important for Google to know that the new pages are replacements for the old.

Yeah Joe I also experienced google doesn't like sudden big changes. Slow and steady wins the race...