[G Penalty?] Significant Traffic Drop From All Sources

[GreenPush]

My client's traffic started to significantly decrease around Nov 21 (Panda update 22).  This includes traffic from all sources - search engines (G, B, & Y!), direct, AND referral.

At first we thought it was a G penalty but G answered our reconsideration request by stating that no manual penalty had occured.  It could be algo penalty, but again, the site has been hit across all sources.

Client has done zero backlinking - it is all natural.  No Spam, etc..

All of his on-site SEO is perfect (700+ pages indexed, all unique content, unique title and desc).

On Oct 16, he switched from his old URL to a new URL and did proper redirects.  (Last year - Dec 2011 - he switched his CMS to Drupal and although there was a temporary decrease in traffic, it showed recovery within a month or so.)

He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold.

Nevertheless, the traffic decrease is not source specific.  In other words, all sources have decreased since Nov 21, 2012 and have not recovered.

What is going on?  What can be the explanation for decrease in traffic across all sources?  This would be easy to answer if it was only Google Organic decrease but since direct and referral have also been hit, we cannot locate the problem.

Please share your personal experiences as well as advice on where we should look.

Could this be negative SEO?  Where would we look?

ANY ADVICE IS WELCOME  !!!! Every bit counts

Thanks!!

[TomRayner]

First of all - have there been any messages in WMT?

If you wanted to check for negative SEO, again, you could check in WMT at the recently added links or put the URL into Open Site Explorer and have a look at any suspicious links.

However, I think you've diagnosed your own problem:

"Client has done zero backlinking"

"He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold."

With this taken into account, why should the website rank high?  If this is to be believed, Google will be crawling a site that no one has linked to, no one has socially shared and, ergo, nobody is reading or caring about.

The algorithm does have a "freshness" factor in it - meaning it might give a temporary boost to rankings to a website that is new and fresh.  After that, however, if nothing is pointing to the website, it could very well have been 'sand-boxed'.

My advice would be to show Google that people are actually interested in the website - and this involves earning links and social shares.

[GreenPush]

Thanks for the reply.

No message in GWMT - in fact, the opposite.... they confirmed that there has been no manual penalty after we submitted a re-consideration request.

I understand what you mean about the lack of backlinks and sharing.  Nevertheless, the drop is relatively sudden... it was not gradual.

I feel that if it was a lack of sharing and backlinks then we would have seen a steady decline as our competitors gained more exposure.

Furthermore, the drop is across ALL sources - including direct and referral?

Any advice on how you explain why we see a drop from all sources?  If the drop is due to lack of BLing or social, then the drop would be limited to organic search, no?

Thanks in advance!