I believe the problem was the ads at the bottom of the page, which have now been removed.

I typed Science Forums in to google and this was the first hit.

Yes, SFN seems to be ranking #1 again for "science forums".

 

I really can't think of any way to explain this. Google has always ranked my sites in weird random orders, no matter what I do. I can usually get a good rank on Yahoo, AOL, MSN, or Live, but Google always seems to do whatever it wants.

 

I think this is very annoying, even though I normally use Google when I'm searching for something. I do like the fact that they are really careful about keeping search data confidential. Other search engines give out this information to different companies and people. AOL accidentally leaked out their search data to the general public, and some web sites still have this information posted for anyone to download.

 

Here's a news article about it: http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/191801184

It's most likely the ads we had at the bottom of the page, which Google probably considered a link farm via their automatic anti-spam systems. We removed the ads and then submitted a request to Google to be reincluded, and now we're back!

I just found it earlier today through google...