Recently the UK government announced that over 1000 government web sites have been closed and another 615 are scheduled to close. A lot of these sites had a close relationship with the charity sector and no doubt had backlinks to various charity sector sites. It is unlikely that any of the closed sites sites have any permanent redirects (301`s) in place. This means that anyone who visits them will get a `Site Not Found ` message. At best visitors will be redirected to another government web site. Either way all the referral traffic (see Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Referring Sites ) and the google ranking that they passed to your site via these links will be lost. This will have a real impact on traffic to many charity sites as Google gives great weight to .gov links when deciding who to rank for a particular search query.

What to do ?  Go to your Webmaster Tools account and look in Your site on the web > Links to your site. Download these links to Excel and find the ones with .gov extensions. Then very politely contact the organisation and ask them to put a 301 redirect on the pages that you appeared on. Then find the new government site ( or indeed any government site) that deals with your charity or condition and ask them for a backlink to you site.