Dramatic Decrease in Google Organic Traffic Indicates a Penalty But None Found

[purpleindigo]

So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May.

http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk

And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking.

Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile".

Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
"somobile" - 1
"somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50

These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
samsung galaxy ace
apple iphone 5 deals
samsung tocco icon

Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index.

It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken.

Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.

[AdamThompson]

Just because there was no manual action taken doesn't rule out a penalty. It could be an algorithmic penalty.

Have you used the SEOmoz crawler to look for possible technical issues?

[purpleindigo]

Hi Adam,

Yes we have. We have a total of 2 Errors (it was 11) - both are 401s that we're working on fixing if we can find the source links.

We have a lot of crawl warnings but they are mostly "no meta description" and "meta refresh" warnings because of the way we link to retailers.

But nothing in the report points to any major issue.

[AdamThompson]

I also notice that a site:somobile.co.uk search doesn't show your homepage or other main pages as the first results. I would consider that another clue you might have a penalty.

[purpleindigo]

Definitely agreed. There are lots of clues pointing to the existence of a penalty, but I can't figure out what the penalty would be.