PatrickDeese - 5:04 pm on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

even a site cited in the guide as a "fine example" of a good quality site suffered greatly in a recent update (that site has now recovered).

Actually if you've been following along - that site suffered a 75% loss in G Traffic in late March.

The fact that his G traffic was reduced even further at the beginning of the Bourbon update is likely related to whatever caused the initial problems.

Since EFV is cited as an example of a quality site with affiliate links, it is unlikely that they would turn around and decide to mark it an "offensive" result.

The theory that the site owner expressed about his ranking troubles, if I recall correctly, was something to do with duplicate crawling of the WWW and non-WWW domains, a simple enough fix which he has since implemented.

The fact that his site recovered during "phase 2" of the Bourbon update without making insane changes (removing Adsense, for example) pretty much proves that.