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This site no longer coming up easily in google searches

K

kentrailman

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Is this happening to anyone else?

Historically I have always found this site by searching for 'rail uk forum' in google but suddenly this site is no longer appearing on the front page when I do this. Other much less relevant sites come up.

Yes I can now use a bookmark but wondering if this is just me or if it has suddenly dropped off the rankings for everyone?
 
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RailUK Forums

P

Purple Train

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Yes, I am having similar issues. Usually one of the threads can be found a long way down, but I have to scroll through endless other stuff like all the sites with reviews of the forum, and the forum's Twitter/X page; it's rather irritating, but a thread from the actual site is usually somewhere further down the front page on my phone.

Glad to hear it isn't just me though! And, if it can't be fixed, it hasn't (clearly, otherwise I wouldn't be here) made the forum unusable.
 
Mike395

Mike395

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I have fixed this - apologies; Cloudflare have changed how one of their AI crawler settings works and Googlebot was getting caught in the crossfire.
 
K

kentrailman

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Mike395 said:
I have fixed this - apologies; Cloudflare have changed how one of their AI crawler settings works and Googlebot was getting caught in the crossfire.
Click to expand...
That was a quick reaction!! Well done! Impressive that you can change it like that also. ... Though not yet changed on google for me.
 
GusB

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I'm finding the same issue with many search terms these days. It used to be the case that when I searched for a particular company name, the very top result would be that company's own sponsored link, followed by its regular listing. These days the top result is very likely to be the sponsored link of a competitor and I have to scroll much further down the page to get to what I actually want.
 
Last edited:
brad465

brad465

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Thank you for the quick fix, this was a problem for me also on my phone (on my PC the site is bookmarked).
 
K

kentrailman

Member
Joined
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Messages
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Location
Kent
GusB said:
I'm finding the same issue with many search terms these days. It used to be the case that when I searched for a particular company name, the very top result would be that company's own sponsored link, follow by its regular listing. These days the top result is very likely to be the sponsored link of a competitor and I have to scroll much further down the page to get to what I actually want.
Click to expand...
One amusing example being Isle of Wight ferries... Search for red funnel and wightlink pops up, search for wightlink and red funnel pops up!! ( not always, but a lot of the time!)
 
SargeNpton

SargeNpton

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GusB said:
I'm finding the same issue with many search terms these days. It used to be the case that when I searched for a particular company name, the very top result would be that company's own sponsored link, followed by its regular listing. These days the top result is very likely to be the sponsored link of a competitor and I have to scroll much further down the page to get to what I actually want.
Click to expand...
Is this specific to Google? I find that searches on Yahoo tend to be more relevant to the search term input.
 
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