Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Luis.  Further questions:

1. You mention "if I don't want to index the forum page."  Would it be a better idea to not even index them?

2. I'm familiar with and have used the disavow page.  Isn't that just for disavowing inbound links from other sites?

I'm thinking of adding a Discourse discussion forum to one of my websites.  I'm not sure if it's going to be something that works well or not for the site.  So I'm thinking ahead and wondering what Google issues I could have if after a few months of having the forum, I decide to remove it.  What would Google think about all the then non-existent pages it might have indexed?  Would there be a simple wildcard redirect I could do in htaccess that would satisfy that? Or some other thing I should do?

"That said, did you analyse all incoming links to determine if there have been any other suspicious adds or drops recently?"  Yes.

"Surely you did other redirects from Site A to Site B?"  No, I have not. That was all.

"You probably know this already given you've presumably disavowed the incoming links from SiteB, but just in case."  Since I've taken the redirects off, I don't think there is a need to disavow; at least that's what I've been told.

"You can ask Google to recrawl the page using the "Fetch as Google" page in the crawl menu of Webmaster Tools. That might speed things up. No guarantee."  Good idea, thank you. I hadn't thought of that.

"f I understood correctly the redirect from siteA.com/blue-widget is gone.."

Yes, it is gone.

I understand your points, but those are not what has caused the page to disappear from the SERPs.  I also have pages such as Red Widgets, Green Widgets, etc, that are still ranking on page one for their terms.  The pages are structured in the same ways as is the now-SERP-missing Blue Widgets page.

I have a previously very strong ranking page that is now omitted from the SERPs, but only for one specific keyword phrase.  I think I found the reason, which I'll explain, and I hope I can hear some confirmation of my theory and a way to correct it.

Let's use the following made up domain and keywords:

Political blog SiteA.com had a few news articles about "Blue Widgets" (like 10 out of 10,000 pages). They became exceedingly popular, so on SiteA.com we created a reference-type page about "Blue Widgets" and in the news articles we already had about Blue Widgets we added rich anchor text (Blue Widgets) links that pointed to this new About Blue Widgets page.  (long before we wised up about keyword rich anchor texts and Google!)

After seeing how much traffic was coming to the About Blue Widgets page, we created a whole new site, SiteB.com, which was about Widgets (not just Blue Widgets), a page for each color of widget, and other pages about widgets. SiteB.com has an important and popular page, SiteB.com/blue-widgets, which is about Blue Widgets.   We then 301 redirected the SiteA.com's About Blue Widgets page to SiteB.com/blue-widgets. This page in SiteB.com ranked very high (like #2, #3) for years.

Two weeks ago SiteB.com/blue-widgets fell out of the SERPs, but only for the phrase "Blue Widgets".  The page still gets lots of traffic from other queries, and even the "Blue Widgets" query will bring up other pages on SiteB.com.  So, the only thing hit is the specific query "Blue Widgets" for the specific page SiteB.com/blue-widgets.

It seems obvious to me that Google took the combination of a) a site that it probably no longer liked since we sold it (SiteA.com) since it's gone downhill, b) the rich keyword anchor text on SiteA.com pages pointing to the SiteA.com page optimized for that keyword, and c) then being 301 Redirected to a SiteB.com Blue Widgets page optimized for that same anchor text.

I only discovered the SiteA.com redirects last week, which I had completely forgotten about, and had them removed right away.

My question is, 1) if this indeed was the issue, now that the redirects from SiteA.com to SiteB.com are gone will my ranking eventually go back to normal? and 2) is there anything I can do to get Google to notice the change and have it go back to how it was?

Thanks for the opinions.  I hate how the Fear of Google makes me have to potentially do or not do things that I think are to the benefit of users.

By the way, since forums are such a pain to manage, the forum I'm thinking of using is the new Discourse that a lot of large companies (like Dropbox, for example) are using. Because it runs on an complex environment I don't want to host personally, I'd host it at somewhere like DiscourseHosting.com (too expensive at Discourse' own hosting since they are just going after big sites). for something like eighty bucks a month.

Technical question: Because it's going to be hosted elsewhere from my own server, I need to map it to a subdirectory, forum.mysite.com, rather than mysite.com/forum (live example: http://bbs.boingboing.net/).  There's not disadvantage to this is there?  I have not heard of one.

Also, I'd be interested in any options in this choice of forum platform, in case anyone has ever used it, or is interested in checking it out. It works differently than the usual forums.

I have an active website with many users adding dozens of comments on the many pages of the site daily.  I'm am wondering if it would be good for the overall ranking strength of the site if I were to add a forum to it (in a subdirectory, like forum.mysite.com).

On one hand, I can see the forum posts as thin content, which Google wouldn't care for. On the other hand, I see the additional user engagement on the site, which I think Google would like.

I know the benefits it can have to the users, but for this question, all I want to know is if this would be seen by Google as a plus or a minus for my site, assuming the forum succeeded in becoming popular. I don't want to do anything that will diminish the value of my site in Google's eyes.

Thank you.

I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors.  99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US.  But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account.  I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others.

But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this.  I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly.  However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site?  Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches.

At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.

I just thought I'd show you all what a typical comment looks like.  as bad as this is, it's only about average. They can be much,much worse.   And yes, it came in all caps, as many do.

I JUST  GOTTEN THIS BUGET  PHONE  A COUPLE OF WEEKS  AGO AND I WANT  ,,,, TO USE  IT BUT I CN'T  CONNECT  WHAT SHOULD , I DO I  NEED A PHONE  REEL BAD  CAUSE I'M THU THE GOVERMENT PROGRAM  AND I  DO HAVE  MEDICAL-CAL  AND I  NEED A PHONE  TO CONECT  PEOPLE AND I'M ON A PROGRAM  WITH THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES .AND IF I  NEED TO B CONTACT  I CAN'T  SO WHAT I DO  . I  BEEN CALLING THE PHONE  BUT THERE NO ANSWERS I'M VERY CONFUSE...

And do you think that Google always knows who the original site is? Do they always check history?

On top of more aged content, we are the only one with tens of thousands of FB Likes (wish they were G+, but our users do not use that), and thousands of comments. All real.

As I said, it is an aged link.  It went in at least 18 months ago.