Over the past few months, my Sitelinks within google search have slowly disappeared (see graph below). Anyone else experiencing same? We’ve not touched the site other than updates for a long while.
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You forgot to post the graph. 
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Same for me. I think Google is reporting ‘No Rich Results Detected’ - finding only the searchbox on each page.
Perhaps see here:
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I see that the falloff of valid pages dates from mid-November or so. There were two releases in that time: 2.9.0.beta11 about Nov 1, and 2.9.0.beta12 about Nov 14. I usually update within three days of a release.
This is my graph:
It seems possible to me the HTML structure of a Discourse page changed in some significant-to-Google way in one or other of those releases.
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And one similar more:
Smaller forum so those drops are more clear. And I have tendency update/upgrade at leat once every week,
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I happen to use a Discourse forum which is obscure and not so frequently updated, and probably not crawled by Google very often.
If I search for
“One bit-flipping NIC took down Amazon’s cloud storage”
I get a result which includes an image from the target page:
I suspect this is what we’re now missing out on. Results for my updated and less obscure forums are just plain text snippets.
Here’s the header of that target page as seen by my browser - not sure if Google sees the same or not.
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<title>One bit-flipping NIC took down Amazon's cloud storage (2008) - cloud - Postmortems</title>
<meta name="description" content="Official statement:
Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008
Peter Vosshall in the video below says
… it took down s3 completely. So one server, one NIC, one bit, took down our regional service and that was the on&hellip;">
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<meta property="og:description" content="Official statement: Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008 Peter Vosshall in the video below says … it took down s3 completely. So one server, one NIC, one bit, took down our regional service and that was the only layer - we had checksumming all the way up and down the stack - that was the only layer that didn’t have the checksumming. As seen on HN: Reminds me of a rogue NIC, flipping a single bit every now and then, that took down S3: Ref: https://news.ycombinator...." />
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Effectively…
In my case it decreased quite a lot many months ago.
In the picture there is only the last period.
Indexed pages have also dropped a lot…
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I’m having a similar issue but it’s likely a site-specific issue in my case (unless others are also experiencing this?)
Sitelinks also fell off for me around the beginning of November. Seems like the homepage is the only one left
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No no, it’s not just your case…
I have the decrease in indexed pages in two different discourse sites and only with this software.
It’s been going on for months and getting worse and worse, now I’m trying to migrate to something else.
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Don’t just focus on sitelinks, indexed pages also have the same problem.
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Yes, seems so, though decline is slower and less dramatic …
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Is googlebot falling in class of unsupported browser?
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what does an unsupported browser see? A page with a single link to a list of supported browsers? 
Then again, how would that explain a decline and not a cliff edge?
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I don’t know. You tell me
I know same as everybody: structure of a site is the base what google is using when it makes decision what and how to show. But the structure is only base and everything else comes from algorithms of Google.
Because this is happening to virtually every discourse site, there is just two options:
- something has happened in discourse
- google has changed the algorithm
And the result is that forums aren’t ”worthy” to show sitelinks. But, most of forums actually don’t need search results with sitelinks. It doesn’t serve any real value to users.
It could show categories. But even here is too many and those would fill/expand resultpages. If any of you haven’t noticed Google tries to keep lenght of seach result page quite same all the time.
I really don’t know. Anyone here doesn’t. But I know so much that even my WordPress-sites are acting totally similar.
SEO is still good, though (edit: I ment say ranking). But, my Discourse is not even close to something I would achieve using WordPress and that is something I’ve wondered quite long time now.
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I would worry a lot less about indexed pages - forums like discourse have lots of redundant links which lead to the same page. We could be seeing deduplication, which is good, because otherwise a forum looks like a giant SEO web farm.
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This topic title says “Site links disappearing” but that graph you linked says “Sitelinks searchbox”.
I googled some hosted sites of us and Sitelinks are still present in all. What is gone is the searchbox part of it.
So something changed somewhere and Discourse search results, when Sitelinks are rendered, are lacking a search input field. That’s a correct description of the problem?
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These graphs are of the results of page indexing. Can someone share what the reasons Google gives for their pages not being indexed?
For example, if I look here on meta, 66% of our non-indexed pages are due to “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”. What are others seeing?
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