It may not be common knowledge yet, but all Know More Media's blogs, including this one, was hit by a Google Penalty (but it's not clear, exactly why) that impacted traffic quite a bit.   While I love wearing my Google Shirts - lately I've had a harder time feeling good about doing so (read The real problem with Google Rankings and let me know what you think). 

On the other hand, I don't run the advertising or web templates on webmetricsguru.com and I suspect the penalty was related to that and/or something about the interlinking.   While the situation is being worked on, I also asked fellow WAA Board Member and Google Analytics Avanglist, Avinash Kaushik, for help.   A couple of people are working on this issue - first is figuring out what the penalty was about (and I'll write my next post about that) and the other - is what to do about - in case you actually figure out why it was caused.

But this post is not about that issue - it's about a post on HitWise that graphiclly shows what happens when Google, for whatever reason, decides to reduce a site's ranking - very interesting post about What happens if your site gets 'blacklisted' by Google?

Well, look at where insurance comparison website GoCompare.com was ranked at last month, before it got the Google Penalty.

"…Before it fell out with Google, this was good news for GoCompare as the comparison site had established itself as the top website within Google’s natural / organic listings for the term. However, since being ‘blacklisted’ it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings – i.e. well outside of the top 10.

 

Then, after the drop in rankings - looks what happens

 

GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google. However, as we see from this chart, searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.

I'll spend another post on The Analytics Guru titled The real problem with Google Rankings -  I gave my honest opinion of the real issues involved with traffic drops related to search engine rankings - I hope you read it and keep coming back there to read more.