Hello, I've been working on fixes for a Panda penalty for quite some time... so I feel silly asking this but.... this IS a panda penalty right? We were hit on April 20th to be exact, so I've been assuming for months it was Panda 3.5... Here is a screenshot of our traffic drop.... Thanks!!!
What was causing the spike between january and april? Just natural traffic or did you start doing something different? I'm wondering if you had some traffic source in April that simply went away and you are back to pre-traffic source levels. Did you get any warnings from google or had you done a bunch of spammy link building?
Thanks for the response. The increase was from organic traffic, mainly from a huge keyword phrase working it's way up to the top spots in the SERP. It was "free music downloads". It was just such a huge increase in traffic getting when we got to the #3 - #4 spot versus when it was like #9 - #10. That was all done from slow link-building over time. The traffic growth was legit. No, no other traffic source that just went away. No warnings from spammy backlinks in GWT. We have probably the single cleanest backlink profile of any other site you see in the SERPS when you search "free music downloads". I know it is very easy to make the quick assumption about Penguin and unnatural backlinks and such... but that's not true w our website. I am positive. In fact, our top 5 anchor text terms are ALL branded terms (variations of "madeloud", our brand). You can see this in OSE. That said, I can totally see some issues we might have with seemingly low-quality pages or maybe even ads that might trigger Panda.