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Serious drop of referrals from Google - I know the cause

This is a discussion on Serious drop of referrals from Google - I know the cause within the General Discussion forums, part of the vBulletin SEO Discussion category; ... but not the solution. I'm wondering if any of you guys can hep me out with this mess. I ...

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    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?

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    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.

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    Agreed -- wait for the effects of the update to settle. Watch for what other people are reporting, and go from there.
    Listings and promotion for hot rod and muscle car websites: The Crankshaft Coalition

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

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    @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?

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    Quote 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.

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    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.

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    @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.

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

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