Wilson Wilson
Bluelighter
I genuinely hate to be that person, but, well, here we go - I was admin at the time when this was all happening so have a good overview of what happened (yeah yeah, really cringing at myself now), so up until last spring I did have a very good idea of what was going on. Don't get me wrong, you're pretty much bang on, just on other than us being removed completely or necessarily actively targeted in a sort of specific or personal manner; our search ranking was just simply severely impacted, and especially when the google algorithm changed to focus more on websites that generate revenue (and hence for google via ads etc). Google released a statement about the algorithm change, and you could tell that google results were radically changed in general. Definitely up until last spring at least the forum was never removed from googles results and people were really on the ball with trying to figure it out/keeping watch, and I doubt it was censored in the interim (but I'm welcome to be proven wrong) otherwise a big fuss would have been made. I suspect what happened with you is that bluelight may have simply been on a different page on google, because we were definitely seriously demoted at one point. In fact, my results even differ from Jackals, and for me bluelight is about fifth from the top. @CFC tends to keep an excessive () watch on stuff like this and could probably clarify.
Again though, this is partially bluelights own doing, as things were essentially configured to the year 2008, and google had no reason to give a free pass for that. I'm not even sure if the character set problems were ever fixed for a lot of old posts, so we probably have search returns returning stuff like trip rep£rt - psych$d€lic €experience of a lif€ tim€, or whatever other bogus text the character set was outputting - simply because the forum didn't understand modern characters that were implemented by various modern OS updates etc and inputted by peoples phones/computers/tablets. I think it was originally caused because for whatever reason people were complaining that they couldn't do that daft ASCII art so the character set was changed and broke a lot of stuff, which was also around the time that Apple release a new update. On top of that, we were under heavy DDOS and running things through cloudflare and blocking googles robots from indexing the site. The website itself was noticably dying and broken in various ways towards the end of its vbulletin run and this severely impacted its ranking.
I'll defer to your superior knowledge of this particular situation my man.
It is very possible the result was still there but on the second or third page. I didn't see it at all on the first page, nor did I see BL show up in general drug related searches for a time, so I made that assumption.
Definitely agree about vBulletin causing problems though and it was very much showing its age towards the end. Running software from 2008 without HTTPS absolutely does get sites downgraded in Google's results. I had been saying for a while BL needed an upgrade or at the very least an SSL cert, especially since they've been free since 2014 (Let's Encrypt) and you can just run scripts to automate the setup.
Was very happy when I came back to BL after a break and saw the upgraded software and TLS finally being used. All much better now!
But I do reckon Google's algorithm changes favour large mainstream sites over forums in general too. You often see results from bloody Twitter over results for forums on Google nowadays. And I always use Google from incognito mode so they shouldn't be personalising my search results (although they could be using some type of "supercookie" for all I know, can't trust a company that makes all its money harvesting your data really can ya).
. God damn it just keeps getting stronger. I remember the terrible weed I smoked 15 years ago, how do kids these days handle this stuff 
333
