renoirm - 9:33 pm on May 5, 2010 (gmt 0)

@Andylew yes we have a few sitemaps in google webmaster tools. What's funny is during these events we are seeing more indexing of the sitemaps as per their internal count (not 100% trusting of total index in WMT but it's one signal). We got maybe 5-10k more pages in Google. Even though we took a serious drop in this Mayday stuff.

I am believing that their is some new penalty going out to sites going for long tail who maybe thinner content on those longer pages.

Here is what I've observed:

1. We have a reputable blog which gets say 5k-10k views a day(it's down 10% only because we have readers and don't relay on GG traffic). Huge love from press (we've been in USA today) but today on a new article we dido not even come up on 1,2,3 page when search for the title. And it's a long tail title. Be it we've had 2000 visitors from Facebook so it's good content.

2. On our site pages with thinner content less or zero traffic. Thinner content meaning maybe 4-8 paragraphs of articles.

3. Our homepage which has a very distinct "unique" name saw a huge drop in it's own name coming from google.

4. An article written that is 1 year old that had over 5000 links doesn't even come up for it's name but all of the people who've linked to us (not all but some) do.

So we have a penalty. What did Google change in Mayday that could do this?

1. Thin content? Too much now draws a penalty? What is thin? 200 words?500?1000?

2. Duplicate content? Is Google hitting pages in such levels that they are begining to think certain websites are dupes of others. Say they are doing Mahalo's "linking out"

3.Site speed. Matt Cutts says it's just one signal but we've actually had to throttle Google down on one of our subdomains because our EC2 Server couldn't take it. Is Site Speed as big as an H1 tag?

4. Site Architecture. It's been said before google loves a flatter site but when dealing with larger sites with long tail data it's hard to bring thousands of pages within 1 or 2 jumps of homepage.

Cutts is back and I've seen 2 posts from him. None discussing this. So I guess it's not on his radar as of yet. Someone call him for me as ask what's up.