Hey, all, I'm back! Had to take a brief respite due to serious illness (as well as trying to play "catch-up" with the poor client who's project got waylaid due to dealing with problems related to the recent switch-over to the new forum software!)
I was able to smooth the client's ruffled feathers, and am proud to say managed to get his site to come-up #1 in Google for an insanely generic worldwide search that returns roughly
1/3 of a BILLION results!!! Along with some more reasonable, targeted searches in the
20 to 70 million range, plus coming-up for a bunch of other things as well - so he's happy! (for comparison purposes, "laser pointer" only returns about 2 1/2 million in Google)
I am also proud to say that work towards my optimized "laser resource" site I mentioned earlier here -
http://laserpointerforums.com/f44/new-web-site-seeking-feedback-27773.html
is proceeding nicely - keyword analysis is nearly complete! One "evil" company that can charge insanely high prices because they are coming up #1 for a bunch of things maybe in for a rude awakening in the near future!
Speaking of Google, I was
very surprised to notice that the change we had worked so hard to lobby for in this thread seems to have been reversed????? :huh:
While it is nice if we were able to do something to deal with problem #5 in my original post above, I would remind everyone that
the other 7 problems described have reared their ugly heads as a result of this reversal, IN PARTICULAR #7 and #8!
Your site's PageRank looks like it was driven off a cliff! And the worst hasn't even taken effect in Google yet!
I warned you previously that...
"Last I checked, LPF had about
11,900 pages listed in Google's index...
LET'S TRY NOT TO DESTROY ALL THAT, SHALL WE???"
But when I checked to see how many of those original pages (ya know, the ones with the
thousands of inbound links accumulated over several years) were still in Google's index, that # had dropped down to 879! :huh:
When I first came across this web site, you had a
very strong PR 4 (almost a 5), with
thousands of inbound links accumulated over
several years,
giving you a strength of authority in Google that cannot be obtained any other way.
I was therefore
SHOCKED when I saw your PageRank
nose-dive all the way down to a 1(!), before struggling to a weak 2! :wtf:
Indeed, the Toolbar PR Display lags behind reality, and given that neither your discussion pages, nor even your main forum section pages,
are showing any PageRank AT ALL,
your site's actual PageRank may have fallen even farther than that!
But because the simplistic 0-10 scale used by the Google Toolbar goes up exponentially for each #, even a drop from your PR4 to a PR2 means that your site
has already lost 98-99% of it's actual PageRank!!! :banghead:
And the worst hasn't even kicked-in yet! You seem to have temporarily benefited from Google getting a bit confused by all the URL's in your new forum changing-around yet again???
It now appears that you have a bunch of
NEW URL's in Google that are broken as well! In fact, it appears that most/all of the pages in your NEW forum that are now coming-up in Google for various searches,
are now all broken links that all just forward to your h/p!!! When Google realizes this, your site's gonna be toast! What the heck did you guys do to your poor site while I was gone??? :drunk:
I know webmasters that would
sell their souls for the kind of authority in Google (thousands of links over multiple years) that your site had. But now -
it's like watching someone use bundles of $100 bills to fuel their campfire!
I think your situation is still salvageable (although this latest bit of insanity I just spotted last night has me a bit concerned - Google could interpret all those newly indexed pages (that now all re-direct) as cloaking redirect spam - which could result in getting LPF banned from Google!),
but not for much longer.
First things first - unless your are intent on continuing to drive LPF's rankings off a cliff - please restore the fix you implemented in response to my first post in this thread!
Quickly, c0ld - before there is nothing left for me to be able to save!