Pages indexed decreasing? Google index shrinking

Originally Posted by wac

- Got rid of the Google Sitemaps (I didn't have it while on Hostgator and everything was great. Some people say sitemaps hurt more than it helps big sites - Don't know if there is any truth to that)

there is no truth to that. the sitemap is simply a suggestion of links to follow.

- Got rid of the rewrite rule in the .htaccess that redirects www.mysite.com to mysite.com in case that was using a lot of server resources causing Google to find a slow server or something (I wouldn't recognize a t-bone about this. Just using common sense) - I didn't have this rule active while on Hostgator before.
- In my webmaster account, I set Google to treat all www.mysite.com urls as mysite.com (I have a bunch of both in the main index)

These 2 seem to be conflicting. you want your
-vb site url
-htaccess
-google webmasters preferred domain

all to match, be it non www or with www's. It sounds like you have your site set up to www and google to non-www. This will be an issue.
Now, I don't know what exactly did it. I have no idea how much damage I have made to my forum but I sure had nothing to lose and my forum's # of pages is growing on the main Google index. Pages are getting indexed by the thousands daily and fast. It appears many of my pages in the supplemental are back on the main index under site:mysite.com.

Google and other spiders are going crazy on my forum just like the old times at Hostgator, although I'm just getting a trickle of visitors so far. Too early to rip the benefits I guess. Hope to get back soon to 1K-2k visitors/day[/QUOTE]

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

These 2 seem to be conflicting. you want your
-vb site url
-htaccess
-google webmasters preferred domain

all to match, be it non www or with www's. It sounds like you have your site set up to www and google to non-www. This will be an issue.

I was following the instructions here [How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects which said that you have two options to do the redirection. One to do it in Google Webmaster Account (preferred domain as mysite.com) or the other one through .htaccess. I deleted in the .htaccess the rewriting rule that redirected www.mysite.com to mysite.com which is the one I had in place. I have no other rule redirecting like mysite.com to www.mysite.com in the .htaccess

Is that ok? I only care about Google, not Yahoo or Bing.

It doesn't matter which you use... they all just need to match.

www's
or
non-www.

on all 3 areas.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

It doesn't matter which you use... they all just need to match.

www's
or
non-www.

on all 3 areas.

Well, the vb url, and preferred domain in Google webmaster match but there is nothing to match in the htaccess file because I deleted those two lines. See below:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mysite\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

So what is there to match in the .htaccess file? Do I have to include rewriting of www.mysite.com to mysite.com here too? I thought it was optional if you set a preferred domain on GWT, in this case, mysite.com.

What version are you using? www's or not?

with www's


RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

without:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mysite\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Hi djbaxter,

I am having the same problem although smaller we have gone down from 32K indexed to 11K as of today at this rate we will be out of the index in a few months. At the moment I am seeing no value from any of the SEO we have done or the free stuff we put on the forum.

It seems that unless you are a porn site google is not interested!

cheers

Roy

I am having the same problem since the start of the year on an off. Traffic has decreased and pages have been de-indexed by the thousands. I don't know if other vbulletin users are having the same problems but certainly there are many website owners who have it. There are many forums out there with complaints.

Our traffic is down 30% since May 1st and Google Mayday algorithm update. It coincides with our severe drop off. Mayday Alert for Webmasters after Google Algorithm Change

My Site:

5 years old
PR3
35+k

Total: 229,579 Indexed: 137,273

not good

You only have 20,000 threads. It looks like you're including a lot of overhead into your sitemap.

see: vBSEO Sitemap Generator : Quality vs Quantity