lorenzinho2 - 11:38 pm on Sep 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

Max, did your site also take a hit around August 4? My understanding of the last two months or so:

- a number of large sites with relatively unoptimized internal pages took a hit on August 4th. Many lost up to 80% of their Google referrals.

- some of these sites then recovered completely around August 25, and smaller sites suffered.

- then on September 22, the dial was turned back away from large sites, and additional filters / penalties were applied to other sites that may or may not be related.

Our take, as a large, fairly unoptimized site that took a hit on August 4 and recovered on August 25, is that this most recent tweak was a toned down version of the tweak that occcurred on August 4.

On August 4, we saw fairly significant erosion in the serps across hundreds of thousands or relatively uncompetitive key words. For example, key words that we had placed #3 for, we placed #10 for after August 4.

This latest tweak is the same type of across the board erosion in the Serps, but the more typical slide is #3 to #5.

I don't think that there's any why to know if this is simply a 'randomization' effort by G to keep folks off balance, or if this indicates some more permanent shift of how sites are ranked.