Is Google devaluing forums:

Several people have reported that Google is devaluing forums and not indexing them well these days. I did notice something similar in couple of forums we monitor. Google stopped indexing our PHPBB forums. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn't index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.



My rankings of what is already indexed didn't drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. And yes, we checked: our board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn't display any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-February than in November-December. It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has "better things to crawl". Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.
We did some research on few of the other PHPBB sites we monitor, and even those boards faces the same situation. I suspect this could just be a temporary glitch with Google. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Labels: Google