Will_Spencer - 3:30 am on Jun 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

I refuse to believe that the sites which were completely hammered by the Bourbon update were spam sites.

My reasoning includes these points:

1. I run 18 web sites. All are SEO'd similarly. Only one was pummelled, one seemed to receive a slight boost, the others were unaffected.

2. The SERPS I am seeing while searching are significantly more spammy than before the update.

3. The site which I lost was not spammy. It was not auto-generated. It was generated by me and `vi`. It was all content.

4. I have some somewhat spammy sites, such as a travel directory built in PHP. Guess who didn't get hit?

5. I am hearing a lot of webmasters say "I got slaughtered, and I'm not a spammer." Sure, they could ALL be lying. It's just not likely.

On the other side of the discussion, I am seeing some very poor logic:

1. "You got hit, therefore you must be a spammer."

2. "You got hit, therefore you must not understand redirects/URL's/blah blah blah other basic stuff anyone who has been doing this for more than two weeks knows."

I do not believe this is some terribly conspiracy hatched by Google to sell AdWords, increase AdSense revenue, take over the world, etc...

I would take an even money bet that the Google AdSense program has sufferred noticeably reduced revenue after this update, as the sites which seem to have been hit the hardest were the pure text information sites which are the core of AdSense click-throughs.

My theory is a simple one: Google screwed up.