Google penalty

[madegood]

Hi, I've seen a steady improvement in my google search referrals since optimising my site and keeping an eye on SEO over the last few months.

I'm only getting relatively small numbers of referrals, around 120-130 a day, but this has steadily increased from about 40 before Christmas. It's been a fairly consistent increase until 4 days ago when suddenly my referral numbers were cut in half.

I'd be surprised if google was penalising me since I'm such a small site, but are there any obvious signs I should look out for?

Oh, and my site is www.madegood.org should that be of help.

Thanks!

Will

[MarieHaynes]

I agree with Chris that 4 days is not enough to make any serious assumptions about what is happening.

There were no known major algorithm updates so it is unlikely that Penguin or Panda has affected you (unless Google released one and didn't tell us, but I think that's unlikely because usually when that happens there is a big spike in people complaining about loss of traffic on a particular day.)

A drop from say, 120 to 60 could be something as simple as a loss of 1 or 2 positions in the SERPS for a main keyword.  And that can happen for a number of reasons.  A competitor could be outperforming you.  Or perhaps the algorithm just changed and favours you less.

Sometimes Google will drop a site a few places (or even a couple of pages) in the SERPS and then a few days later will boost you up higher than you once were.

I wouldn't make any major changes at this point.  If it doesn't get better though then you may need some digging into your analytics done to determine where the drop is coming from.

[madegood]

Nice one Chris. I'll keep an eye on things.

You've been very helpful!

[Chris.Menke]

My last thing was:

4.) In this case four days is not enough time to make a sound judgement about whether there's a problem or not.  That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't be looking closely at what may be happening.

40K links from 300 sites though.... That may be a precarious balance.  I'd say stay focused on generating social engagement while you work  to build out the number of linking domains, not just the number of links.

[madegood]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I never did get a particular large number from a specific keyword, it seems to be across the board. My branded keywords don't seem to be sending any traffic any more ('madegood', 'madegood bikes' etc) but I suppose that could be a coincidence.

My inbound links have been increasing, including some really good ones from guardian.co.uk (x6) and inhabitat.com (x1). Webmaster Tools tells me I have 39,862 from 262 domains, and this has been increasing steadily too.

I know this sounds odd, but the drop coincides directly with enabling webmaster tools data within my analytics account. Could this be related!?

Is it possible that google might be just trying things out and it could return to normal, or do I really need to fix this?

Thanks again

Will

[Chris.Menke]

Hey Will,

A couple of things:

1. Size doesn't matter when it comes to penalties--except that it might take a little longer to get caught, with an emphasis on "might".

2. Are you doing anything that you might get caught for? A three-fold increase in referrals is nice--whatcha been doin' to make that happen?

3. Have you investigated the sites referring you to see if anything has changed there?  What site(s) that was referring you traffic is now referring less?  If it was typical website, are the links still in place? Maybe it was penalized or dropped in rankings for some terms and they're no longer getting traffic that they can refer to you. If you mean search engine referrals, was it a specific keyword that stopped sending you traffic or was it an across the board drop and have your keyword rankings dropped? Have you lost any strong links in the recent past.

These are some of the things you want to look into as you work on figuring this out.