Google Penalty - WebPages Indexed Declining - August 2013 Update

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We run a fairly large discussion forum that was enjoying great traffic till the 3rd week of August, 2013. The forum started losing traffic from 24th August 2013 onwards (Possible Google Update) and have lost over 30% traffic since then.

It seems that the reduced traffic has less to do with our website rankings but the steady decline in the number of pages being indexed by Google. Our traffic was at all time high in mid-June 2013 when the indexed pages were highest (272,301) and these pages must be getting traffic on thousands of keywords from Google.

As per GWT, on 15th September, Google has dropped 112,542 pages from its index which implies that traffic coming from all those pages is gone since those pages no longer exist in Google's index.

Date Total indexed
13th Dec 131591
19th May 132078
26-May 134561
6th June 134971
9th June 169593
16th June 272301
23rd June 230502
30th June 216234
13th July 208252
14th July 197016
21st July 188913
28th July 182135
4th August 178364
11th August 173409
18th August 170941
25th August 166620
1St Sep 162319
8th Sep 160261
15th Sep 159759

We never made any changes to our website structure or else.

Earlier, we got an "Unnatural inbound links" notice on GWT on 9th June, 2013 and another notice on 21st June that "Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs we could not access. It is likely that your server had an internal error or was busy when attempting to process these requests."

Further, our re-consideration request was declined on 27th June and 22nd July and the site continues to be penalized.

So what could be the Google Penalty?
- Decline in rankings? or Webpages being dropped from Google's index or both?

How do we get Google to re-index all those pages and have the Penalty removed?

Still pondering if there is any co-correlation in the Google penalty and the steady decline of our pages in Google's index.
#2013 #august #declining #google #indexed #penalty #update #webpages

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