PHPBB forum bringing me down?
by Sapphire (May 14, 2006)
One of my most-trafficked sites - the “B-2 Bomber” suddenly has less than 100 pages indexed. At one point it had over 9,000. It still gets good traffic from Google, and sometimes Google reports 1,400 pages indexed instead of 100. But I’m concerned.
The one thing this site has that none of my other sites have is a PHPBB forum that constantly has people signing up with their spam casino and porn sites in the user profiles. I did everything I could to prevent and discourage them, but they still trickle in, and I delete them manually. While I don’t know if this is why Google’s lowered the number of indexed pages so drastically, it’s the only thing I can think of.
I’ve also noticed that the forum pages are no longer indexed.
The forum has been incredibly inactive for a while, but I wanted to leave the pages there just because… well, I don’t relish the idea of deleting everyone’s posts. But I wonder if I should just nuke the whole thing.
Posted in SEO, Traffic
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August 23rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I too used PHPBB for my forum site - and I was spammed like there was no tomorrow for people flogging cell phones, porn and RX sites. I just gave up because of the bombardment. Fortunately for me - I hadn’t really gotten to far in developing the forum - unlike you who has over 9,000 pages. I don’t know if there’s something you could import those files to - that might be a bit more secure in it’s spam settings?
Wow… that wasn’t helpful at all - but I just feel for ya wading through the spam.
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I haven’t found a better alternative yet, but I really don’t need the forum. I decided to kill the front page links to it and see if anyone notices or cares. I’m starting to think it’s more just Google being bizarre than anything I’ve done wrong, but we’ll see.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:57 am
I’m just starting a forum on my site, and wondering if I should kill it before it gets too big. Any ideas?
October 19th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
I’m no expert, but if there’s a forum software out there that has a better reputation for security, I’d go with that, even if it’s not free.