Big_Balou - 10:41 pm on Sep 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hello jacon4 from a fellow north carolinian.

As far as this update is concerned I'm at a loss that G* would take such a heavy handed response to what seems like a relatively isolated problem, P*R for sale.

I can understand penalizing in such a way to make it too painful to even think about but why all the "collateral" damage.

To this some might say that G* is just trying to protect their reputation and discourage tweeeking, but what happens when that "tweeeking" is just common sense to make a visit more enjoyable and productive to the searcher. I'm not talking about opt*m*zing to the extent that some may take it to but good ole common sense usability stuff. The things you learned when you first learned HTML.

For what it's worth for the kws, very niche, that I follow there has been a good deal of turnover and now commercial sites that have corporate backing(big brick and mortar names) are showing with high P*R and have displaced the small to midsized sites. Relevancy is moderate to low unless you want to dig through the sites for what you want.

As far as personal sites I have seen an almost accross the board drop, none are what you would consider optimnized other than title and relevant text, all except for one page of one site which actually made a move up on a site where everything else dropped!( one ex. #19 to somewhere past 600). Go figure.

This has just convinced me that I put too much importance on G* for traffic and I'm not going to do that again.

I'm trying to look at things from a long term perspective and this change is disapointing but not totally unexpected. It will be interesting what the s*e world will look like in a couple of months.