Google keeping fewer pages in its index?

I have a site that had 3,000 indexed pages a week ago but now has around 200. It's a PR6 message board and I have no idea why the decline. has anyone else noticed something like this?

 

Yeah I think Google might be having a play with the dupe content filter again. I've noticed the same on my forums.

 

Same here..

From 24,000+ and down to 8,600 pages indexed from my forum now...
And I've also noticed that googlebot has been VERY quiet in my forum the last few days...
It used to spider hundreds to thousands of pages every day, but the last few days: None!
Msnbot and Slurp is running all over the forum by the way.

 

He he. I went from 3 pages to 4200.

 

I'm happy with my indexed pages

 

I was wondering if it was because of the phpbb seo hack I just did. Is it possible that fewer garbage pages crawled means fewer pages indexed?

 

I dont have much information about googles algo for indexing pages! my other site does not have phpbb and there are around 44000 pages are indexed by google and the other site there are around 13000 pages indexed [ only month old].
probably good traffic and good backlinks! always pays off!

 

By the way I'm nearly back to normal (2200). Has everyone else also recovered?

 

1000+ extra pages added today.
Googlebot had spidered only 50 pages until yesterday (since the end of April) when it suddenly decided to show up again..
2,000+ pages crawled the last 24 hours, and it's still there, so something is going on now..

 

Highly doubtful if you're talking about the Craven de Kere MOD. It might be one of the other ones, though. For example, did you try that bots MOD in beta? If not, don't. That one was blocking Googlebot on my phpBB forum.

 

The same happened to me..

But there's a fix for it, so it's working now.

 

You mean there's a fix for the bots mod?

I think I'll still wait until the phpbBB MOD team approves it... I spent a month trying to figure out what had scared Googlebot away and then found Google had indexed a page with an error message on it rferring to the bots MOD. Not good!

The SEO MOD by Craven de Kere (without all that mod rewrite stuff - that's overkill) is all you need to keep the spiders happy and returning on a daily basis for more fresh content.

 

That's what I'm talking about, without the mod rewrites

 

Here you go..

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1514774#1514774

I was down to only 400 indexed pages, from 24,000, when I discovered the bug....
Up to 12,900 now, so it looks like the bug fix is working.

 

It sounds like most that are running blogs or forums are seeing the most deindexed pages by Google. I admin to many sites that are html and php based. 90% of my pages are basically handcrafted, 10% are auto generated...forums and photo albums. 10% of my handcrafted pages were deindexed while most of my auto generated pages were deindexed

 

Maybe, Homer, but not ALL forums or blogs. The problem with many forums is that they really are NOT optimized for spiders. If you start by understanding that spiders aren't going to accept session cookies or sign in or do a visual verify, and that having the title of every page start with things like {My Forum Name} - View Topic or {My Forum Name} - Forum Index isn't the best way to rank well in any search engine, you can maybe take a fresh look at your forum and find fairly obvious explanations for why it isn't doing very well.

 

Thanks, redleg... I may have another look. I must admit I liked the idea of those guests showing up identified as Googlebot, Googlebot, Googlebot, MSNbot, Googlebot, Slurp!, and Sleazebot in the online stats

 

Yes Minstrel, I can see your knowledge with blogs and forums is far greater than mine. I use my forum for a very specific purpose in my business so I could care less about it's public success. It is mainly used for confidential client contact where user names and passwords are required. I don't put much energy into SEO for my forum.

My point was that It seems (to me) that blogs and forums seem to suffer the highest degree of deindexing. While webpages that are unique html/ php and have decent PR seem to be more stable in Google's index...just my opinion

 

Sorry, Homer. It's been a long week in my day job. I wasn't trying to crow about how much I know about forum software....

...rather, my point was that ANY page will fare badly if it isn't spider friendly and SE optimized. Your comment that you don't put much effort into SEO for your forum underscores that point. Many people don't. But if they did, I don't think you'd see any difference between forums or other dynamic pages and standard html pages.

 

I have a couple of blogs that have been trashed recently, a couple went down to 1 page indexed (from a couple hundred) and another down to single digits. I haven't changed anything significant lately. I'm wondering if maybe Google started using a filter that examines deep links more closely. This has always worried me and I just never did anything about it. My sites that got hit all have many links to the home page, but nothing deep I don't think. My sites that have survived all have atleast a couple of outside links that are not to the homepage. Anyone else having similar experiences?