Have a look at this graph showing Econsultancy's referrals from natural search from Google over the last months.

You can see that at the beginning we were getting around 5,000 referrals a day. This nosedived towards the end of December 2008 before picking up again 10 weeks later in late Feb 2009. Last week you can see the referrals falling off a cliff again...

The first drop is due to our site migration and the seo impact which is extensively documented. This, whilst frustrating, was at least understandable given the size of the changes we made.

The latest nosedive is more of a puzzle to us as we're not sure what we've done to cause it. So a prize to whoever can help us figure it out!

(it doesn't appear to be a penalty as we're still ranking for a search on our own name etc - just a massive 'downgrading' of our domain.)

The only 2 things we can think of the moment are:

1. Adding 'no follow' to our blog comments and forum posts

In accordance with what we felt was Google's view on best practice, we recently changed it so that ALL blog comments and forum posts on our site (including the archives) now have the 'no follow' attribute for links. This is to help avoid spam for SEO reasons and as this is not Econsultancy "editorial content" then perhaps we shouldn't be passing pagerank. But many of these links are also internal to our site. Could the big change in PageRank/linkage data somehow have freaked Google out? 

2. Geotargeted page content is being seen as duplicate content?

We've also recently started to personalise the content of pages further according the user's geography. So, on the same URL, you might see something that is similar, but different, to a user somewhere else in the world. For US users we use USA spelling and pricing in dollars for example. Could Google see this somehow as duplicate content? 

Feel free to post any thoughts as replies to this. As ever, we're keen for others to learn from our mistakes!

Hi Luke

The Googlebot sees exactly the same as the users sees - but different users see different things. This is pretty common e.g. in showing things in different languages based on geography. 

However, I don't know 'where' the Googlebot 'is'? In the US, in the UK, both? Presumably both. Just possibly it's getting confused by seeing two versions of the page which are very similar and freaking out as a result?

But we're certainly not cloaking or showing anything to Google that's any different from what users see. In fact, we're making the user experience much more relevant and better which Google encourages...?

When you say 'appeal'? Who to and how? Over 3 years ago I suggested that Google should provide an appeals mechanism but I don't think it exists? There is the 'reconsideration request' in Webmaster Tools but there is no guarantee of a reply and no timescale for when anything will be done so it is completely opaque.

Without having access to your data or indeed working at Google I can't be sure that this is the problem but it might be. Would seem very harsh and as you say it's providing increased relevancy, Google's mantra.

You could try twitter.com/mattcutts . I've seen him reply to webmaster questions on Twitter before so he might help you out. If you don't get a reply you could try rolling back the changes and see if that helps when you get recrawled, differential diagnosis House style.

@ Luke. Yes, we've tried the Matt Cutts on Twitter route. Bet everyone does!

I'm loathe to start to change things which we fundamentally don't think are wrong in the first place and that goes against what Google would say I'm sure - rather than try to play the SEO game you should focus on your users and the customer experience. Doesn't quite cut it, of course, when your search dries up!

Also, all the suggestions so far are, at best, informed guesswork. I'd rather make changes based on fact! 

morning, Ashley, how are you?

Is this across all terms, or some specific 'big' terms for which you've slipped in rankings?

Does it affect traffic from all countries? eg, you can set up an 'advanced segment' for the USA & another for the UK, then in your Google traffic report you can see how those segments shift, rather than just looking at the top line.

Another odd thought - do you have partnerships with any universities (I know, for example, the IDM does). I'd guess most students are now on easter break, which could affect that?

I hope that helps - looking forward to further info.

dan

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