Vbulletin forum with 3.8.4 and Vbseo. Over 100K pages indexed and growing showing under site:mysite.com. Not a problem in that department. Google dropped 1000s of keyword rankings overnight. Adsense earning is dead overnight. Have had close to 25 google spiders at the same time constantly on my forum since then, 24/7 I guess. Traffic dropped from thousands UV daily to 200. Started happening about 8-10 days ago overnight. What say you? What do we have in common? I don't use sitemaps, GA or any other Google tool. Actually I use GWT but quit submitting sitemaps awhile ago so I don't use GWT.
GBot is more concerned about social media where people tweeting about farts. Weird, but this is just a case for why we need to network on our own and be less dependent on Google.
Check to see if you have been hacked. Trust me, there are a few people with a similar problem. A lot of people see the drop in traffic, but have no idea why. Code has been added to redirect people hitting forums from google searches. I'm one of those that been hit by this myself. 800+ unique a day down. Others have been hit a lot worse. One guy is down about 4k unique a day Some hacker has found a way of putting a redirect in, and people hitting your VB powered site, end up at a nice virus loaded web page instead More can be found on the issue on the following link http://www.vbseo.com/f3/security-issue-vbseo-3-3-x-41463/ Good luck if you are in a similar situation. There is a quick fix to he problem that takes seconds to do, if you have been hit.
Like Lee G said ... It could be a hack. Click through on your site see whats happening then ftp into your account. Look at php files see id there is any inserted code.
A few people, me included found this one by chance. Noticed a big drop in traffic. clicked on a good ranking term in google. Rubbed my eyes, thought I had hit a link by mistake. And this could happen once a day, not all the time. Then I did a google on Filestore73.com and hacking. Seems a lot of us on VB 3.8 have been hit. disable vbseo re-upload product file with overwrite, re-enabled vbseo. is the easiest fix. There is a more in depth walk through on there if you want to find what file they hit http://www.vbseo.com/f3/security-issue-vbseo-3-3-x-41463/index11.html#post262135 I'm still trying to undo the damage these guys did myself in dropped ranking etc
Most people that have reported having their Vbulletin forum hacked have reported a similar down turn in traffic. I checked my own stats via google webmasters and my site map indexed pages went right down to zero then started all over again from over 120k pages indexed. This gives an idea of the impact on traffic when they hit my own forum Its as though you get the -30 penalty after or worse. Its not just Vbulletin forums that run VBSEO that are getting hit. From what I have bee told, there are a lot of forums just using Vbulletin being hit from my own understanding of the problem. Many people have no idea as to why and just blame it on google caffeine or just bad luck Its a nasty one if you get hit and very clever how its done. I'm still struggling to get some of the traffic back, I dread to think how long it will take to get back to how things were, prior to being hit.
I had some javascript inserted in my blog one, my blog would just chuck people to a new website randomly. Easy to fix but harder to repair the damage
I have been having almost 50 Google spiders at the same time eating my forum since 6 days ago. No visitors though. Dropped overnight since 2 weeks ago. Will check the Vbseo link.
I guess my forum wasn't hacked. Read the Vbseo thread and I checked Google malicious virus tool and my WMT and they report nothing wrong with my forum. I have the latest Vbseo too and there is no redirection going on either. I believe this is caffeine related. There is a long thread at Webmasterworld from around the date that traffic rankings dropped on my forum. I have 119K pages under site:mysite.com and growing everyday by the thousands and have had around 50 Google spiders on the forum at the same time for a week now; no visitors though...