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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 Screen-Shot-2012-05-03-at-10.49.40-AM.png

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 Screen-Shot-2012-04-27-at-8.39.32-AM.png