mantucket - 5:26 pm on Jun 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

Ha, if everyone is afraid to talk about the elephant in the room, we will continue to be crushed every time it sneezes :-) But the issue is already well past being instigated - my friends said there were recent articles in the NY Times mentioning potential antitrust action etc.

At any rate I'm doing the same as you, focusing on improving my site - but I've never seen a decline so severe that was such a steady trend before. 1 year ago I had a similar problem but it turned out to be a bug on my end where site was sending blank pages to googlebot! That was a sudden turnoff and just as sudden recovery, but I spent 3 months assuming it was some kind of 'penalty'.

So I have a plan, and I hope google will regain its regard for my pages - but if I guess wrong about google's sudden re-definition of 'quality', the impact is huge. What I need is more guidance from GWT about what caused the 90% drop in traffic in my case.

Also, I'm confused by the conflicting messages goog is putting out about this update. On one hand, matt cutts says MayDay was an alg change by the Search Quality group that impacts ranking of long-tail sites by 'quality', a vague and subjective criteria. On the other hand, cutts is still recommending to smaller sites that they cultivate traffic from long-tail keyword variations (see the recent google IO site review session video). It's as if goog is too big for one hand to know what the other is doing...