The explanation for that is pretty simple (and HIGHLY annoying)... :?
A couple of months ago I installed a script that was supposed to count the number of times Search engine spiders/robots visited the forum pr day, and how many pages they crawled..
The script seemed to work fine, and there were hundreds to thousands of visits by them every day.
But the next couple of weeks google seemed to "loose" more and more of the indexed forum pages, and the number of daily visitors and registrations started to drop.
It went so far that all of the forum pages and even the index page of the forum disappeared from the Google index, and I could not understand why.
Everything seemed to work fine, and the script still counted many hundreds of spider visits every day..
But in the beginning of this month I discovered by "accident" what had happened..
There was a major bug in the script, that made ALL pages look like this:
phpBB : Critical Error
Could not get theme data for themes_id [1]
When SE spiders/bots visited the forum..
Every single page looked exactly the same, so they were kicked out of Yahoo/MSN/Google etc.. because of that.
But I fixed this a couple of weeks ago, and all of the search engines are spidering and indexing the forum pages like they should now.
Google is up to 9500 indexed pages, from 350, but it's still a way to go to it reaches 25,000+ again, like it was before the bug.
The number of daily visitors and registrations have gone up the last week, and I expect it to rise every week (day) from now on...
The forum is again climbing to the #1 spot in google for the search term "Military Forums" (#3 now)..
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=military+forums&meta=
:evil: