Puzzling drop in search referrals.

[madegood]

Hello All,

A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8

... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!?

Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining.

Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site.

Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it.

Will

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Will

I just want to make sure by "referrals" - do you mean organic search traffic, or do you mean actual referral traffic from other websites?

I can give you some suggestions for your site, but I think what you'll really want to do is use segmentation and your data to isolate specifically where the traffic loss is coming from.

• Start by looking at the "mediums" - does one drop more than the other? Direct traffic ok? Is it just organic search traffic that dropped?
• Then dig deeper - is it's organic traffic, is it a particular keyword? Is it a particular page?
• Also, see if you can isolate an exact day - or did traffic drop gradually.
• Also, look at desktop vs mobile traffic - maybe something happened there.

I'd also suggest looking into webmaster tools data. Traffic loss is an effect of many possible causes;

• lower search volume due to seasonal fluctuation etc
• a drop in rankings - did any of your main keywords lose ranking?
• less clicks. you can rank just as well but get less clicks from some reason

So - dig into that and try to isolate one particular traffic source/keyword/landing page.

• • -

Now, regardless of what you mind, I see some things that you might want to fix.

MadeGood.com

• I see there's a site at .com that relates to the main .org site. Does this receive any traffic? I think you might be best to 301 redirect .com to .org - there could be potential duplicate content or confusion there as it's a similar site.

Backlinks

I looked through some of your links in OSE and found a few that could be hurting (or at best, no longer helping: ie devalued)

• viennacyclechic.at/tag/winter/ - are these image links in the sidebar ads? This site needs to nofollow those, as Google requires nofollowing any paid links ("ads").
• peak-hives.co.uk/ - the sidebar in "other links". this could be totally natural, but it seems a little misplaced (different topic, kind of random?).
• hotvsnot.com/Sports/Cycling/ - not terrible, but possibly among a set of links that are not helping anymore.

The good news is I don't see anchor text issues, just the placement of some of these links. What I'd recommend here, is;

1. Remove any links that you can that might seem oddly-placed or out of context. Any ad space you're paying for, make sure that site is nofollowing them.

2. Continuing building new links! I think you had a pretty good idea on some of those - using photos to get links, related industry sites etc. Start here.

Hope that helps!

-Dan