stuartmcdonald - 4:34 am on Oct 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, after I got over the cardiac arrest I had when I looked at the stats on that September morning, we made one change that was rather substantial.

Previously, the left nav bar was always the same with around 30 links off to various areas of the site (all internal), and because of how the content was organised I was concerned about duplicate content and thought that may be one of the reasons we got smacked by google.

So we reworked the navigation so it was substantially different across the site - not 100% different, but went from 100% identical to about 30% identical, with more relevant links for the users.

That was the only major change and it was made within days of the belting received by google - we're adding new content into the site regularly - at least once every day or two - but we've been doing that for the last 12 months, so can't imagine that is the reason.

Looking at the serps it seems Google lost us, as about 90% of the links from Google now have no description (where pre Sept 23 they all did) and that still hasn't returned to how it was before. Yet the stats show that the surge in traffic is definetly coming from google - its a bit weird to be honest.

Its not a Pagerank issue, as we're pagerank 4 and always have been.

I know none of this probably answers your question - my feelings at the time (23/9) was that we had been unfairly penalised - caught in the wash that grabbed scrapers like tripadvisor etc - someone on this board suggested it was just a case of google losing an index and be patient - I tried that with my bank manager - she is still laughing... but it seems there was some truth to the comment.