I first advertised on mamma a few months ago. Shortly after, my site got banned by Google. I wasn't sure there was a correlation, but I put the advertising on hold hoping to get the site reindexed. Strangely enough, the site kept its PR5 until the recent update even though it was not indexed anymore. Since it dropped to PR0, I decided to use the funds remaining on mamma to bring traffic to another site... Since then, my site has gone from an average of 100 visits from google (70%) to 0 visits from google, now 100 % MSN... and mamma. The site is still indexed - this is currently a roller coster - 1000 pages last week, 400 earlier this week, climbed back up at 800, down at 400 -and its still a PR5, but I am starting to think there is a correlation. I have only made two other changes to the site, essentially removing the swicki on the main page and adding one new link to it. Is there a correlation between advertising on mamma.com and loosing google traffic?
There may be and there may not be. Google will rate a site based on the trustworthiness of it's inbound links and the trustworthiness of it's outbound links. I wouldn't think that any single advertising campaign would be a problem, but if it is the only marketing that you are doing, the trust rank of your advertiser could be an issue. Momma's been around for a while, though. I don't really have an opinion on whether they are a decent site or not because I've only been by a couple of times. I would venture to say, however, that your experience is more likely a result of other factors - it could be that you were experiencing a temporary boost given to new sites on less competitive keywords/phrases. It could be that you had some inbound links that disappeared or lost their trustworthiness. It could be that your server experienced downtime during spidering time, or maybe even your host blocked the googlebot (it's happened once or twice that I have heard). It could also be that your content is being duplicated by another site and google for now favors that site. It could be that your rankings just slipped slightly but now to page 2,3,or 4 because of new competition. And then there's the fact that your site hasn't been updated much at all - could be that the content is considered stale. Who knows. There are just too many possibilities to blame it on a single advertiser. I imagine if you thought long and hard you could come up with a list of other factors that could be affecting your rankings.
Thanks for the analysis. Thats why I tend to ask questions on DP only. People actually think about the answer. That said, I have redirected the mamma traffic to another site right after this post. I'll let you know if it has an impact.