dangerman - 2:26 pm on May 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

Agree with rants from Hollywood: 'Everyone ask yourselves, does Google care?'; Simonmc: 'We are all running around chasing our tail when in fact the problem of solution lies with Google'; Konrad: '..what happened is not "some" problem - it's a tragedy; Petehall: '..a lot of people from this board are now losing faith in Google'.

My view now is this: Google plainly do not value webmasters and their respective sites particularly high in their priority list:

1. Shareholders
2. Employees
3. Adwords customers
4. Other paying customers
5. The searching public
6. Lastly: The poor webmasters who toil daily to produce quality, updated content for their sites - which ironically form the meat and veg of the behemoth's business.

However we scream and rant, we cannot get away from the fact that this company has the biggest chunk of its market. We have to play the game or wither away.

My view is that on April 26th Google let loose a particularly vicious, not brilliantly thought out and, dare I say it, evil (from webmasters and users p.o.v.) algorithm update.

All possible factors on a site that google consider 'offensive' are accumulated and a resulting value quantified. These factors could range from duplicate page issues as recently discussed, to excessive javascript to spammy titles etc etc. If this value exceeds a given threshold, wham! - the site is hammered. It seems the 26 April algorithm change lowered the bar and therefore had a dramatic effect on a number of websites.

Guess the best strategy is to analyse the entire site, get others to analyse the site and clean up all potential issues one by one. What more can you do?