Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks again for the feedback.

I see what you;re saying but to be honest I cannot fathom as to why they would be of any significant importance, and so them being taken away shouldn't count a jot really.

Our content is v popular (just check out facebook.com/wpmudev where's it's reposted plus other stuff, we've got stunning social metrics as well as a vast array of quality, genuine, interested organic links.

And we never went about it in any serious way, and stopped in 2009 or so when we were picking up 300 visits per day rather than the 20k we were prior to the 24th

Hola All,

This is a update of http://www.seomoz.org/q/gah-unfaorly-hit-by-massive-google-penalty

Updated because:

• Google webmaster has gotten back to us that there have been no manual actions taken against us

• Results haven't improved one jot

• We're completely flummoxed as to why this is happenin

Quick summary:

We run the larest WordPress news site on the web, WPMU.org

We're completely legit, a team of 4-5 great writers, amazing original content, massive fanbase on twitter and facebook, a 60k email list etc, established for years and years.

We're absolutely not and haven't done anything gray or black, the worst we've done is including links in the footers of some themes we've distributed

Since the 24th April our google referrals are down from an 8.5k daily peak to 1.5 - see the attached.

Articles which have consistently attracted several hundred referrals per day have disappeared from the rankings to be replaced by republications or just links to the, for example, here's one on the dangers of searching for free WP themes, decimated:

http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/

Check out how legit we are!

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=wpmu.org

And the problem:

How to get our google traffic back?

We're completely stuck

We can't find issues within the site content, or even particularly within the backlinks (we've removed all links from Edublogs)

We haven't been manually whacked, so we can't get that changed.

Absolutely nothing within the penguin update should have hit us... in fact by their reckoning we should have had a massive improvement over all the trash that competes with us in the WordPress space.

Help / Ideas / Feedback / Criticism / Anything desperately sought.

Thanks for your time,

James

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@Georg, tanks for that!

@Boodreaux, ugh, that's shocking service, wasn't like that back in the day

Still looking, it looks like it could be victim of our own success / couple of minor errors around http://edublogs.org

Essentially we tried to remove all links from blogs there to wpmu.org back in the day, but missed, literally, about 3.

And then there's been a lot of splogging on edublogs of late that we're really working hard to clamp down on.

And they are choosing the theme with the wpmu.org links on it.... so 2+2 it coudl be that.

We've now removed all links and are splogging like crazy, using http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/anti-splog/ (one of our plugisn too).

And have p[ut in another request.

Would love to hear from a Mozzer too, given our 4+ year membership here (in which time we've asked like 4 questions

Thanks guys.

@Kevin on edublogs it's only the homepage that links to wpmu.org, sub blogs only link to WPMU DEV (separate site) which hasn't been impacted.

Given the prominence of our other sites in the WP space, and the relevance of the topic, I'm not sure if removing links from them to wpmu.org would necessarily be the best approach?

Thanks for other link and we'll go and post in the wbmaster forums now too.

@stubby yes, no paid links, only footer links are from themes (like the 'Powered by Wordpress MU' ones and at least 3+ years old), not at all odd for a WP provider either.

Open to other thoughts / ideas!

Hi Guys,

We're the folk behind http://wpmu.org and have just been hit by a massive fall in google referrals, see attached

There's no reason in webmaster tools for this, were not engaging in any spammy or dodgy practices and are a massively established and well staffed news *& tutorial site for WordPress (one of the biggest, in fact!)

We've upgraded WP, and requested a referral, but without actually knowing what's going on it's extremely hard to figure out what to do

Maybe we're a wrong hit regarding this: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/04/googles-new-search-algorithm-to-crack-down-on-black-hat-webspam/ ?

At the moment pretty much the only thing I can think of is one of our authors being dodgy, but I don't think they would be, and I don't know how to go about finding out.

Anyway, if you guys could take a look and let us know anything you think might be up, and share any advice that'd be super super appreciated!

Cheers, James

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