We're sinking with Google.......

We installed VBSEO about 7 months ago and witnessed dramatic improvements in our indexes with google in literally a matter of days. We made it up to having 1.9 million indexes and we stayed there until we moved to the newest version and we started to go down, we didn't make any configuration changes. Over the past couple of weeks we have been losing our indexes and rankings in numbers about 50,000 a day... What in the world is going on? Right now we are at 855,000 and going down each day... I dont have a lot of time to really dig into it right now, is there any recommendations from you guys that could help?

Hayabusa.org/forum

Sounds like google is getting rid of duplicate pages and adding more juice to the ones that matter. Are you seeing any decrease in ranking, traffic. or long tail keywords?

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Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

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PM Sent

Originally Posted by tavenger5

Sounds like google is getting rid of duplicate pages and adding more juice to the ones that matter. Are you seeing any decrease in ranking, traffic. or long tail keywords?

The total number of pages that are being submitted in the sitemap is still rising in corrolation with the new post. However the total index is going down drastically.... I am definatley not an SEO expert but there has to be something wrong, the numbers stayed high too long for things to be Okay...

Cap

You have 175 sitemap files. The long and short of it is that you're giving the search engines EVERYTHING, and thus, your good content it getting lost in the bloat.

I'd highly suggest turning off everything in the sitemap except the forum display and the show thread options. A site your size will NOT benefit from the other pages being in the sitemap.

You do have markup errors, but none look to serious.
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://hayabusa.org/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator
it can't hurt to fix those.

I would also suggest disabling/turning off the archive. with vbseo, its not needed and its all duplicate content.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

You have 175 sitemap files. The long and short of it is that you're giving the search engines EVERYTHING, and thus, your good content it getting lost in the bloat.

I'd highly suggest turning off everything in the sitemap except the forum display and the show thread options. A site your size will NOT benefit from the other pages being in the sitemap.

You do have markup errors, but none look to serious.
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://hayabusa.org/forum/ - W3C Markup Validator
it can't hurt to fix those.

I would also suggest disabling/turning off the archive. with vbseo, its not needed and its all duplicate content.

I think that I turned all the un necessary options off, is there anything else that I need to do to get the sitemap files down or will this take care of itself?

my personal board has 1.4 mln posts, and i use 5 sitemap files @30k urls each. you have about double that. I would think 10-15 would be the expected result, not 175. I'd double check your settings again.

I'd double check your settings again

When I say that I checked them I mean I turned them off after you made your reccomendation.

Ok, be sure to delete all the sitemap files from your ftp/file system, and re-generate (as you will have less files, you don't want the old ones hanging out there any more)

Ok, be sure to delete all the sitemap files from your ftp/file system, and re-generate (as you will have less files, you don't want the old ones hanging out there any more)

I did as you advised, the numbers keep dropping, Im open to suggestions....

By the way, thanks for the advice Brian.....

Doug

This isn't you and it isn't vBSEO. This is Google.

As Google rolls out the new so-called "Google Caffeine" version, many sites are seeing reductions in the number of pages indexed. Why this is so isn't yet entirely clear. Nor is it known whether this is a temporary adjustment or something more permanent.

This has happened before with Google. I think the last time it happened was in 2006.

See The incredible shrinking GOOG! 25% smaller... | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com and discussion at Pages indexed decreasing? Google index shrinking

Google Caffeine, will you lose your rank or will increase ? - vBulletin SEO Forums

good news folks I finally got it all figured out.... Apparently Google changed the size limits for sitemaps. We had been using 50,000 URL's per file for the past 13 months then all of the sudden it stopped. I lowered it to 25,000 and waited 4 days before noticed changes. What messed me up is that when I submitted y sitemap to Google it was showing all the previous sitemaps and that they failed. Once I let the new submissions just sit there I noticed that Google was replacing the red X with a checkmark. Its been about 2 weeks now and we are all but 2 files accepted and those will be done tonight.

Guys let me take a second and thank you for being very patient with me and offering suggestions.. My rankings are going back up now.

CAp

Originally Posted by captain

good news folks I finally got it all figured out.... Apparently Google changed the size limits for sitemaps. We had been using 50,000 URL's per file for the past 13 months then all of the sudden it stopped. I lowered it to 25,000 and waited 4 days before noticed changes.

Where did you read or hear that Google lowered the size limits for sitemaps?