Over the weekend, GIDForums™ lost almost 60% of it's regular traffic from Google. So, if we were previously attracting about 100 people off Google SERPs at any one time, we now only have about 40!

Since I had upgraded from vbulletin 3.0 to 3.5 last September 21, I thought the forum script upgrade had something to do with it and wasted my time, looking for a problem that wasn't there.

A day later, I found out that there was quite a major update going on at Google that resulted in some other established sites losing just as much traffic as GIDForums™.

Looks like it's going to be quiet around here for a couple of months -- at least I hope that it only lasts that long...

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Thats very bad.
Lets hope it will get over soon.

Regards,
Paramesh.

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Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
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My sites lost a lot of traffic near the end of September when Google seems to have done a "tweak". I haven't noticed any huge changes since last weekend but Matt Cutts has recently added an entry on updates to his blog.

ps - This update has been named Jagger.

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Thank you for the link Div, but I have been visiting his site since this whole thing started.

I read all 58 comments (which have accumulated so far) and I really like this one the best: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-i.../#comment-1429. Often I think the same way but I would never state it publically, let alone post it to Matt Cutts' blog.

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

I haven't noticed any PR or backlink changes just yet.

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The minute this was posted, I kinda guessed why GIDForums™ was hit so hard this update!

All vbulletin forum pages include many instances of style="display:none;" in the markup.

Coincidence... or something to think about?

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't understand what's going on. Does this imply that people are hiding text in a web page using CSS to create an excess number of search "hits"? And that because of this Google's "banning" these sites from their listings?

Is this kinda like the sites several years ago that, when viewed, showed several dozen words like "Ferrarri cars guns boobs porn Alyssa Milano" etc.; the thought being that regardless of what you searched for you'd land on this site simply because they had a "match"?

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Keyword stuffing using hidden text through CSS is a long standing spamming technique. But as usually happens, Google often ends up throwing the baby with the bathwater. Its probably time to go review the CSS on all my sites just to make sure everything's kosher.

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Hi J,

Sorry to hear that. I like the forums. Many of my partners lost positions in Google and their web sites fallen down in favour of well-known big companies. At the same time Host Color Support Forums gained PR 4 from 0. So I should be contented. Should I? No! I think Google commersialized the algorithm and did the same mistake Yahoo made 5 year ago. As a result I see more people comming back to Yahoo (They fixed the mistakes I think) and MSN. Dogpile also goes up.

I think that if Google goes this way they will looose a lot of their fans.

Best Regards
D.

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My current default search engine is http://search.msn.com. I didn't do it to be spiteful or anything immature like that. I prefer to be practical and I would use whatever I consider to be serving relevant results for my searches at any one time.

If I search [c++ forums] on Google this past few days, the results are incredible. The no.1 link is (a directory) www.freeprogrammingresources.com/cforum.html and no.2 is a "suspended service" page like www.cplusplus.com/forum/. There are some more ridiculous results like these but I can't be bothered to go through all this garbage looking for any excuse to continue using them for now.

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™