Macro - 9:51 am on Feb 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Chelsea, I don't know about "more" or "less" change over the last few months. Perhaps the type of sites that have been adversely affected recently are the highly competitive ones and/or the SEOed ones (white hat/black hat/grey hat/multicoloured hat) whose webmasters are more likely to post here. For every page that's gone down another one has moved up. It's unlikely you'll get a similar number of posts saying "I used to be #180, now I'm #3, damn, bl**dy Google, I've lost faith in them, I'll never use them anymore, I hope they rot in hell".

What would be a step in the wrong direction is if most of the pages that have moved up in SERPS are from spammy or price comparison type sites. If in some subject areas that is the case then hopefully Google will correct it in the next dance. They don't have a choice. If spam takes over Google, Google will ultimately cease to exist.

There are some spam sites still in SERPS. I get them now as I used to before, I get them in my subject areas and when I'm generally looking for information outside the subects areas of my sites. They do not seem to be dominating the SERPS though. Since yesterday I've done some more research on my logs. I've got plenty to complain about both on Florida and Austin as many, many pages seem to be getting less traffic from Google. But the *overall* picture over all my white hat sites (some NOT optimised at all) is one of substantially more traffic from G SERPS.

ScottM's msg #2 is still the best answer to the original question.