Forums are being de-indexed

Some people are claiming their Forums are being de-indexed thanks to the new Google updates. This has been a topic on several prominant SEO forums lately including Digitalpoint, WebmasterWorld and others. I myself have noticed this lately. Most of my forums had decreased in number on indexed pages or had the majority of pages moved to Google's supplemental index. One site had decreased from over 200,000 pages to less then 20,000 indexed.

Even vBulletin had lost a tremendous number of pages, going from 1,300,000 pages in Google's index to less then 200,000. I dont know that this is focused only on forums or on all large, dynamically created sites. But it seems to be affecting forums.


Matt Cuts Said this in his blog....


Some site owners over at WebmasterWorld have been discussing an issue where on Bigdaddy data centers, the site wouldn’t be crawled as much in the main index. That would result in Google showing more pages from the supplemental results for that site. GoogleGuy requested feedback with concrete details, and several people responded with enough details that we identified and changed a threshold in Bigdaddy to crawl more pages from those sites.

I checked in that email queue tonight to see how the “gonesupplemental” feedback looked. I looked at an emergency responder site, a truck site, a ticket site, a karate site, a silver site, a T-shirt site, a site about memory, a site selling a type of document, a boating site, and a jewelry site. All were getting more pages crawled, and I expect over time that we’ll crawl more pages from these sites and similar sites that people mentioned. The biggest site that I saw had 711K pages reported, and I saw other sites with 40,400 estimated pages and 52,700 estimated pages for a site: search.

So the upshot is that if you’re one of these people who was paying attention to this issue, I think it has already improved quite a bit, and I would expect to see more pages indexed in the coming week or two. Some sites may see improvements earlier than others because of where a site happens to be in Google’s crawl cycle.


I have noticed some forums coming back. My aforementioned forum has now bounced back to over 300,000 pages indexed in Google's index. vBulletin is also bouncing back, gaining 150,000 pages in the last week.

SO if you have lost indexed pages - dont worry, the'll be back soon.

Um... at the risk of looking and sounding stupid (after all I am a moderator here), how do you know how many pages, if any, are indexed? Where do you look?

See Joey told you I didn't know alot. MY title should say hospitality moderator, lol

In google search box put:

site:www.example.com

That will show you your indexed pages.

ahaaaa.. learn something new every day. I have 11 pages indexed :D

Your forums are shut off from public view for guests, so google cant index them.

they've only been shut off from public view for a couple of weeks, but I opened them again last week.
Hey I'm happy to have the 11 pages indexed!

Their still shut off so google cant see them.

You would need to open them up and get some links pointing to the site....

Their still shut off so google cant see them.

You would need to open them up and get some links pointing to the site....

that's what I said... I re-opened them last week

Oh - Well it takes a little time to get reindexed.

yup I understand that. I'm not complaining. I think the reason that I DO have 11 pages indexed, is because I installed a hack a couple of weeks ago that lets spiders go where registered members can go, even if your site is closed off like mine was. Pretty kewl stuff

yup I understand that. I'm not complaining. I think the reason that I DO have 11 pages indexed, is because I installed a hack a couple of weeks ago that lets spiders go where registered members can go, even if your site is closed off like mine was. Pretty kewl stuff

No it's not, it's cloaking and it will get you banned completely.

There is no point in closing a forum when the spider can cache the content for public view anyway. Just open the forums.

it will get me banned from where? Not from my host.

We closed certain areas of our forum due to content and my desire to protect minors. Those areas will always be closed to the general public

it will get me banned from where? Not from my host.

We closed certain areas of our forum due to content and my desire to protect minors. Those areas will always be closed to the general public

If the search engines can see it, kids can see it in the search engine. Think about it. ;)

Showing one thing to guest and another to google is cloaking and will get you banned from the index IIRC.

If the search engines can see it, kids can see it in the search engine. Think about it. ;)

Showing one thing to guest and another to google is cloaking and will get you banned from the index IIRC.

I got that part darlin... no stupids here ;)

banned from search engines OHS ;)

also if your worried about kids viewing, I'd remove avatars from guest, sorry, but these are the only reason why I wont post on your site :(

banned from search engines OHS ;)

also if your worried about kids viewing, I'd remove avatars from guest, sorry, but these are the only reason why I wont post on your site :(

sorry you feel that way sweetie, but you do have the option of turning off the avatars.
It's an adult site, you knew that when you registered, and should have expected adult-type av's ;)

I'd be interested to know whether the impacted sites used Google sitemaps or not, and if there was any benefit being felt by those sites with them.

I've just added one to a site with only a couple of hundred pages returned in the index, yet the forum alone has 6000 threads. I know that's a relatively small forum, but it's also only 5% returned - and that doesn't count the number of pages in articles, shopping etc.

I've just added a Google XML sitemap for the forum. I'll be watching to see what impact there is.

That happened to me about a month ago, and I recovered a few weeks ago. Even the 'Supplemental result' message is gone.