Google at it again

[ArtG]

From May 30th to May 31st, Google handed me almost a 50% haircut in indexed pages. Did anyone else see a decrease during that time frame?

Just want to know if it was something with us or a larger change within the Google algorithm regarding forums.

As always, focus on what you can control (putting out good content and a great experience) and let Google do Google-things...

 

[bzcomputers]

I did see a significant decrease in indexed pages during the same time frame but the de-indexing for me appears mostly related to Google finally removing a lot of URLs that they indexed prior to me blocking sections of my site with robots.txt.

For example, for a few years now, I have been blocking /members/ pages and it appears they've finally gotten around to removing thousands of /members/ pages that were indexed years ago before I blocked them with robots.txt.

I'm sure there are other pages involved too but at this time I'm not seeing any significant change in Google referrals. It's only been a week so time will tell.

 

[Alpha1]

For example, for a few years now, I have been blocking /members/ pages and it appears they've finally gotten around to removing thousands of /members/ pages that were indexed years ago before I blocked them with robots.txt.

That's positive.

 

[benFF]

Yup, dropped from 300,000 indexed to 120,000....!

They've now all been moved into "Crawled - currently not indexed"

Edit: And all thread pages

 

[briansol]

yeah, it's a been a rough few months here. took a nose dive too.

 

[GrnEyedDvl]

I actually noticed it and tied it to the very day I enabled AdSense. I have not run ads in years but I enabled them on the evening of May 19th, and suddenly took a big hit in pages indexed and in page views reported by Google Analytics. Oddly enough CF analytics remains constant.

This is a pretty new import from vBulletin. I installed Google Analytics on May 4 and you can see it start tracking well. Huge spike on May 11 which appears to be a bot scrape or a DDoS attack. Google actually shows a drop on May 11 which makes sense because I shut some stuff down. Google only tracks if the javascript gets loaded, CF tracks via traffic through their network so it doesn't matter if a page actually loads or not. It records the attempt.

AdSense (which is NOT linked to my Analytics account) enabled the evening of May 19 and page views completely tanked. On May 25th they actually show fewer page views than the number of posts I personally made. I made 11 public posts plus a few PMs that day, they show 9 total page views.

Note that the CF stats are Visits and someone usually has more than a single page view per visit, and the Google stats are page views. Before the 19th these were roughly lining up.

For today CF shows 27k page views. Google Analytics says 9k. Google AdSense says 7k. Nothing weird here though...

Spoiler: Cloudflare

Spoiler: Google

 

[KSA]

I actually noticed it and tied it to the very day I enabled AdSense. I have not run ads in years but I enabled them on the evening of May 19th, and suddenly took a big hit in pages indexed and in page views reported by Google Analytics. Oddly enough CF analytics remains constant.

This is a pretty new import from vBulletin. I installed Google Analytics on May 4 and you can see it start tracking well. Huge spike on May 11 which appears to be a bot scrape or a DDoS attack. Google actually shows a drop on May 11 which makes sense because I shut some stuff down. Google only tracks if the javascript gets loaded, CF tracks via traffic through their network so it doesn't matter if a page actually loads or not. It records the attempt.

AdSense (which is NOT linked to my Analytics account) enabled the evening of May 19 and page views completely tanked. On May 25th they actually show fewer page views than the number of posts I personally made. I made 11 public posts plus a few PMs that day, they show 9 total page views.

Note that the CF stats are Visits and someone usually has more than a single page view per visit, and the Google stats are page views. Before the 19th these were roughly lining up.

For today CF shows 27k page views. Google Analytics says 9k. Google AdSense says 7k. Nothing weird here though...

Spoiler: Cloudflare

View attachment 323596

Spoiler: Google

View attachment 323597

Classic XenForo behavior after a vBulletin import. Sure, vBulletin was crusty but at least Google knew it existed. XenForo: where SEO goes to die… but hey, at least the emojis are crisp. Welcome aboard!

 

[GrnEyedDvl]

The import happened on April 25. I did not enable Google analytics until May 4, and when I did they looked fine.

 

[benFF]

Google Indexing Less Since Late May 2025?

Several individuals have inquired whether Google has been indexing fewer pages on websites since late May. I've seen a number of complaints, and while nothing is verified on Google's end, I wanted to share these reports with you.

www.seroundtable.com

My non forum site also dropped from 700k to 250k!

 

[nodle]

At this rate, it looks like Google is trying to kill off forums. I went my 30k+ indexed to only 840 .

 

[cdub]

Yup my indexed pages dropped in half too. It's AI results. It's killing us.