Good points on the old software, lack of HTTPS, and improved SEO - however BL absolutely was censored by Google in the past. I remember you could literally type in "bluelight forum" and it would not come up. I had a screenshot of it, but it was on an old phone, no idea if I still have it. Promise you I'm not lying though.
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.