Having a really busy morning here but have recieved an alert in relation to another popular search engine forum that has been wiped from Google last night.

The reason for the post is that it could be to do with the continual emergence of Big D or is more sinister, if it is more sinister is there an increasing danger to all forums (including this one).

Excuse my low post count here, I am in the industry and have been since 96' but usually lurk here and post in another forum. Over the last few months the other forum has got increasingly stale and this forum has inspired me.

The point is this, are you at risk as a medium for discussion?? Google seems to have removed 225k pages from the other forum. My appologies if this is the wrong place to post or if its covered elsewhere but my time on this is limited this morning.

something odd is happening and it affects a ton of forums - and other websites

several *big* forums are MIA and that includes seochat and this one !

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=site:forums.searchenginewatch.com&hl=en&lr=&start=70&sa=N

PS - perhaps someone can ask the google reps over at the SES conference what on earth is going on

SEW looks fine to me - Results 951 - 953 of about 317,000 from forums.searchenginewatch.com

Im back on it now :)

Yes it is definately an issue, the forum I was referring to was seochat and whilst I have suspicions about why its been done to seo chat I think that a wider picture is unfolding.

In a nutshell many SEO firms have introduced forums to boost their web stature, masses of text data eagerly updated and archived. Its really in many cases just an unberella for an SEO technique, what comes with the forum is better search positions because websites are suddenly a 'resource'.

Its an easy way to grow your SEO website, news articles, forum posts, faq's, industry info, how much of it really is for the benefit of people, in my opinion most of it is driven by advertising and extension of SEO profile for individuals and organisations.

In addition, why would Google want to hold a quarter of a million documents from a single website that may be years old and reconstituting the same information.

Now before you all jump on the bandwagon I have followed legitimate forums for years, they have been inspirational and a great resource, but... even a couple of the top facilities are now stagnated. In addition, in our industry even 3 months is a lifetime, why would Google want archived pages from eons ago, they in many ways are no different to themed content pages.

I think what is happening is that Google is turning its attention to ALL areas of duplication and websites utilising so called 'resource centres' as a means of creating stature are now also under the spotlight.

There is no holy ground now, we all know that written content is king but also we know that if you get invloved in running and administering a forum it can be very beneficial to your Google status (and other search engines).

As an excercise go to the top 5 SEO company websites and carry out a site search in Googles database, then check out the absolute rubbish that pours forth as so called content, thousands of pages that inflate the true stature of a website.

Its all driven for one reason, and we all know why ;) .

This may be changing.

I know of a few sites that blipped out of Google and came back in again. The longest timeout was 7 days. They're all hosted at the same web host so that might be an issue (though they've got different IP addresses (same class c, though)).