bobmark - 2:24 pm on Sep 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

EXACTLY! I agree 100% Loki99
To take the new index top 10 on a significant search phrase for my category it went from 9 out of 10 similar large sites all with relevant content on the 3 words in the keyphrase (of the type "country adjective noun" as in (PURELY HYPOTHETICAL) Antarctica resort hotels) to 7 out of 10 irrelevant, spammy link or doorway pages offering only a single page or zero pages on a large link farm site devoted to the country named in the search and 1 404.
Write off my fall from #5 as sour grapes if you want - maybe I have a terrible site and I just don't know it - but it was me and 7 other large, quality sites that vanished or dropped to pages 8 through 15.

(added)
"I'm sure Google may be costing you money, but what are you giving them?"
You think Google indexes us and runs their SE as a hobby? Google's product is search results for the consumer. That is what they sell and their business model is similar to the broadcast television networks where the quality of their product (or at least the volume of use of their product if quality is not important to consumers) determines their ad revenue (and of course syndication through aol, Netscape, etc.).
However, unlike the tv networks, they don't produce original content (programming) but use existing material. It is like they are 24/7 America's Funniest Home Videos where all the content is provided by people who are both consumers and suppliers.
That said, it is a symbiotic relationship where they provide quality "leads" to us in return for profiting from our hard work in providing quality original content to them. However, they hold all the cards; while I assume amazon.com, ebay etc may have direct access to an actual person at Google, the rest of us don't so the game is played totally by their rules which they neither specify except in the broadest terms or undertake to maintain any consistency in.
If you want to answer the question "what are you giving them?" think about a month in which just before the crawl every website blocked Googlebot from crawling in its robots.txt file. This is an example: I am neither advocatiing this or suggesting it is realistic.

[edited by: bobmark at 2:43 pm (utc) on Sep. 28, 2002]