FourFourTwo given the red card by Google?
SEO 
As the respective leagues in Europe reach their tantalising final stages, you would expect the search traffic to FourFourTwo – one of the largest football publications going – to be sky high. Particularly in a year where previous relegation battlers Leicester City look set to become Premier League champions, Real Madrid look to be in pole position to achieve an historic eleventh Champions League title, and PSG ran away with Ligue 1 in France.
Well, it’s not. According to Search Metrics, they are among the biggest losers of the past week, down from a peak search visibility of 13,697 to 9,884. Ouch. If they keep going down at this rate they will soon discover Aston Villa.
It would appear that Google has given them the red card, as the drop in traffic coincides with a disappearance in search for the keyword ‘football’.
Down at least 94 places from 6th for such a valuable keyword, this has surely got to be the result of a penalty from Google. But for what?
The answer may lie with the fact that following their rather controversial warning last month that sites and bloggers should ‘no follow’ and clearly label sponsored links, Google pushed ahead and two-footed the worst offenders – FourFourTwo (FFT) being one of them?
The site is a lesson in analysis before conclusion during a turbulent period of penalties and manual warnings from Google. It’s not as if FFT has a Majestic Trust Flow of 5, it currently stands at a very respectable 47. Furthermore, in reading their ‘Features’ articles – the place most likely to find any advertorial - they are for the most part only linking internally. When they do link externally, their links are followed, but lead only to high authority sites such as the Telegraph, not a nefarious product link or anything else that would cause one to raise an eyebrow.
Further investigation reveals the real reason why FFT’s ‘football’ keyword rankings have dipped so significantly, and sadly it is not as dramatic as this article originally made out. There is no penalty. Their content piece eulogising the late great Johan Cruyff performed particularly well and led to them ranking for a valuable search term they historically never rank for - hence the recent peak in traffic as mentioned at the start of the article.
Data from SEMrush explains.
As you can see for April there is no traffic for “football”.
However in March, when Dutch legend Cruyff passed away, FFT jumped into the rankings for the keyword ‘football’ for the first time thanks to a lot of shares on their content piece about him.
Data from February highlights how they historically never rank well for the search term ‘football’ – proving the dip in traffic is of no concern. All that happened is an article did very well and created news traffic from a term they typically never rank for. As the interest in that article faded so did their rankings for that keyword.
So what is the point of this article? It demonstrates the need to not panic when search traffic is down. The knee-jerk reaction is of course to blame the situation on a Google penalty, but more digging often finds the truth. Now if only Louis Van Gaal could find his philosophy…
Written by a currently suffering Man United fan.
