TAY posts are no longer found in Google searches

Could somebody have hacked the site and removed the forums using Google webmaster?  See if a file exists on the TAY server of the following form:

www.turns-all-year.com/google*html

Otherwise, I don't know.  It seems like that robots.txt file should be all right.  On my site the robots.txt file has zero entries (No lines of User-Agent: or Disallow:) and the forums are crawled constantly and results appear in Google searches.

Google might also do this if the site seems to be infected with malware.  If you get a Google webmaster account going for TAY then it will tell you if this is the case.

Thanks Sky.

The robots.txt is as Matt describes. I'll take a look at the Google webmaster account setup.

There was a malware problem last March, which could be part of the issue. Amar felt that the Google problems have been more recent.

Okay, in playing around with the Google Webmaster tools a bit, I'm not seeing a ton of immediate red flags.  The Google "Fetch" tool shows that Googlebot can get to the homepage and to the main trip reports directory with no problems. 

There are no server access errors and a handful of "Soft 404" errors that seem to point to specific threads and not an upper level directory.  I'm not even sure if those would actually prevent indexing, or if they're just one time errors encountered at some point in the past.

I've resubmitted a "Fetch" that had a successful result to The Index (I feel like I'm playing a video game) along with all linked pages -- I'm going on the theory that this will request a "reindexing" of the site by Google?  Like I said, flying by the seat of the pants a bit, but hopefully we can get it straightened out. 

There's no malware shown by the Webmaster health tools, but there was a sharp drop in total indexed pages on the site that started at the beginning of the year and tanked around early March and has been more or less flatlined at 2600 pages since then.  Not sure how that came to pass, but the total indexed on 11/2011 was almost 64000 and the total after early March has been between 2500 and 4000, so there's clearly something funky going on.

Maybe reindexing will help.  It is interesting that the malware problem seems somewhat correlated in time with the indexing issue.  Please keep us posted!

TAY SHOULD BE NUMBAH ONE GOOGLE HIT 4EVAH FOR "SKI MUIR SNOWFIELD" DANG IT!