We follow Google's content and link development policies.

March 1, 2011 - PRLog -- We follow Google's content and link development policies. We don't buy or sell links. However, we are small. We do not have big marketing budgets and until recently this was a second job/hobby for us. I relied on other smaller web masters to share our work with their readers and thereby build links that are signals to Google.

I want to stress this here. Every link we've EVER built has been from a REAL, well-spoke site with REAL content, not spam content, from REAL players actually doing home improvement in their homes or businesses. We never BOUGHT any links. I feel like because our site is small and not on the cover of the New York Times that Google is treating us like we are just spam. This is 100% not true to their goal.

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This algo. update has decimated our business and has elevated other, seemingly large and irrelevant sites, into the rankings. It seems like google now favors large "general" articles over smaller "niche" articles in our domain. Presumably the logic is that the niche articles are less valuable. I have found this universally false in the niche we operate in.

I get the need to cull the spam - especially from the loser no-content sites that just pay a bunch of people who barely speak english to string together words. That's not us. And this is very hard to swallow.

1. This is a sitewide penalty. If you Google deems your site as "bad" it applies a discount to each of your page's "score"

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2. It's not a direct -X in the SERPs. Instead it affects the page's score, so the end result of the SERP depends on how competitive the listings are and how clustered the scores are

3. Certain sites/segments that "should" have been hit weren't. And sites/segments that "shouldn't" have been hit, were. The classic example is eHow, everybody wanted them hit, and they're still doing fine. You also have the spam sites that appear to be doing well. Reasons for the spam sites to be doing well is that they're probably too small to trigger the "content farm" flag and score discount

4. It doesn't seem like any sites are getting "boosted" but are simply being rewarded by not being discounted, and therefore relatively they have a better score.

5. The score discount seems to be tiered. That is some are affected slightly, while others are affected a lot.

6. A drop of 40-60% in Google US traffic seems to be the common number. So whatever the score discount they apply is chosen to result in that level of traffic loss. It seems too specific to not be a deliberate choice.

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So overall what happens for a particular search before and after is that a certain group of sites are flagged and then drop down the rankings. All the relative ordering between the non-flagged sites stay the same, and the relative ordering with the flagged sites stays the same for the most part. It's simply the shift that the flagged sites have relative to the non-flagged sites that sees the flagged sites lose traffic, and the non-flagged gain traffic.

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