Member Avatar for Dani

I know that there's mention of this date in another thread I started here, but I wanted to draw attention to it.

We lost 50% of our traffic on Tuesday, November 20th, 2012, and haven't recovered since. That day I don't believe lines up with a Google Panda algorithm update (which we were hit by and recovered from in the past). I got some confirmation that other forums were hit on the same day as me.

Does anyone know what happened that day? Any feedback appreciated!

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Dani AI

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Context: reported a roughly 50% organic-traffic drop around late November 2012 and several replies floated both algorithmic and hosting causes. The practical next step is a short, prioritized forensic checklist to determine whether the loss was algorithmic, manual, or technical — then apply fixes that map to the confirmed cause.

Recommended diagnostic checklist (run these in sequence):

  • Inspect Google Search Console (manual actions, messages, Coverage/indexing) and the URL Inspection results for representative threads.
  • Pull Google Analytics by Landing Page (organic traffic) for week-over-week and month-over-month comparisons to identify which sections and individual threads lost the most sessions and when the drop started.
  • Review server logs for the exact date: check for increased 5xx responses, long timeouts, blocked Googlebot requests, IP or DNS changes, or CDN misconfigurations that could produce a sudden index/ranking hit.
  • Confirm robots.txt, global meta robots, canonical tags, and rel="prev/next" behavior — accidental noindex/canonicalization mistakes often take many pages out of the index.
  • Look for large numbers of near-duplicate or extremely short threads (thin content), faceted navigation producing massive URL duplication, or scraper sites outranking original threads.
  • Check backlink history and major linking sites for sudden removals; compare competitor movements to rule out industry-wide shifts.

Forum-specific recovery guidance:

  • Take the worst-hit pages identified above and improve them first: add unique summaries, accepted answers, or moderator-provided context so each thread stands alone.
  • Noindex low-value paginated, tag, author, or sorting pages; canonicalize parameterized URLs. Consolidate or merge duplicate threads rather than leaving many low-value pages indexed.
  • If a manual action appears, document fixes thoroughly and use Search Console’s re-request/reconsideration pathways; if the issue is algorithmic, expect gradual recovery after quality improvements and subsequent algorithm refreshes.

Monitor changes via analytics and Search Console and track historical SERP volatility tools for corroboration. If multiple forums experienced the same timing, that correlation points toward an algorithmic event rather than a single-host outage, but the checklist above will reveal which bucket applies and guide remediation.

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Member Avatar for canadafred

The update on that day has been kept a corporate secret.

Member Avatar for HoverportMedia

I did some research on this day Dani and unfortunately nothing was announced by Google - except for the #22 Panda update. I did read somewhere, it may have to do with your hosting server (which seems illogical) and I did hear that those effected recovered. You want to submit your site to Google and see why your ranking was effected.

Member Avatar for Dani

According to moz.com

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Panda #22 - November 21, 2012: After some mixed signals, Google confirmed the 22nd Panda update, which appears to have been data-only. This came on the heels of a larger, but unnamed update around November 19th.

I think I was hit by that "unnamed" update :(

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