What could have caused this type of drop off...

This is just search engine traffic.



This is the past year, I started using vBSEO sometime in May or June I can't remember. I'm a hockey related website so the July/August months are normally slow. But you can see the significant growth, then all of a sudden a major drop.

I did upgrade vBSEO at some point but I can't remember when, I'm wondering if I messed up something? But I don't think it was within the last month where the drop off occurred.

Anyone got some ideas?

I have not moved to vB 4.1 yet, so I'm going to rule that out.

I was hacked recently and a lot of sexual related urls were thrown on my site. I just was going over the webmaster tools on google, and I see they some how got picked up even though I had removed them almost instantly. Would google be punishing me by chance?

Turns out when google crawls the main forum link it still see's all these links in the code. Except when I go and view source of the main forum page with firefox it doesn't show up in the code. So I'm going to backup and re-upload all the original files and see if that helps fix the problem.

Any way to contact google and let them know it was a mistake from being hacked?

Does any of this look messed?

# Comment the following line (add '#' at the beginning)
# to disable mod_rewrite functions.
# Please note: you still need to disable the hack in
# the vBSEO control panel to stop url rewrites.
RewriteEngine On

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be
# enabled (remove '#' at the beginning to activate)
# Please note: when enabled, you must include the path
# to your root vB folder (i.e. RewriteBase /forums/)
#RewriteBase /

#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^baiduspider [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^naver [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(.*\.php(/.*)?))$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]



RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?goaliecrease\.net/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !vbulletin\.org [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

I think major drop is related to your site performance and content. You should focus on bounce rate and quality of the theme and of cource speed. It's usually happens when site develops energy and traffic about 1 month then after lowers suddently. If site did not perform well and not get enough clicks from SERPs during this period and/or enough backlinks developed with this traffic.

You can ask for reconsideration request. But you need to nicely prepare thedocument. Real people read it. And it should include what have you done for seo and when and how it happened. This can help if you labelled somehow spammer for search engines due to bad content.

And if you did not get any backlink for the content you offer. It's expected it lowers the rakings. I think you should more focus on developing backlinks for your forum. I recommend social bookmarkings.

I'm almost sure it's related to the hacking and the porn links put in. The timing is exactly there, I've done some updating and fixed the problem. I'm sending in a reconsideration due to the porn links now being removed from the html.

I dont know the deails of the hacking but if porn links appeared as dofollows (not inside of the vbseo). Becasue vbseo automaticly noflollow them. And if it's important amount like tens of. Then it's the reason for. I recommend you to move your site cloudflare system. It protects you from hackers for free. You can get more details at my final blog post.

Also you should put enough details on reconsideration request other wise it may be ignored. Try to be specific as much as you can. Real people will check it. And developing backlinks are %50 of the seo. And wish you good luck hope you revocer your hits fast.

thank you.

The links are probably your issue.

Clear it up, lock it down, and fill out the form:
Requesting reconsideration of your site - Webmaster Tools Help

This damn hacking changed all my keywords that show up in webmaster tools

1. sex (4 variants) 2. post (4 variants) 3. video (3 variants) 4. amateur (3 variants) 5. hentai (2 variants) 6. image (2 variants) 7. goaliecrease 8. porn (3 variants) 9. spank (5 variants) 10. girl (4 variants) 11. japan (3 variants) 12. dildo (3 variants) 13. pee (4 variants) 14. pussy (4 variants) 15. bbw (3 variants) 16. dog (3 variants) 17. movie (2 variants) 18. teen (3 variants) 19. fuck (4 variants) 20. squirt (4 variants)

Any way to reset this so it'll re-crawl the site and pick up the proper keywords? This is terrible for my site.

There is good fucntion in vbulletin for censoring words. You can just clean them "forever" if you add these keywords in censor box

Originally Posted by webmastersitesi

There is good fucntion in vbulletin for censoring words. You can just clean them "forever" if you add these keywords in censor box

I can understand where you're going with this, but this wasn't the case. This has nothing to do with the forums, it was done by hacking in to my server, where there was additional code added to all the pages. It was hidden, no one on the front end saw anything, but the spiders picked it up.

It will fix itself in due time. webmaster tools runs on a farily big delay of sometimes up to 2 weeks.