mantucket - 2:26 pm on Jun 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

Gshaun, 6 weeks starting now or starting May 1?

I've noticed faster spidering of my site in the past few days, and many more Crawl Errors reported, which is good, this is likely due to Caffeine.

I don't understand why google has to be secretive about the basics of a rollout like this, they could tell us to hang tight before concluding whether Mayday or Caffeine is what killed a business. The lack of transparency causes some sites to spend big $$ on diagnosis.

What I really need is a systematic list of potential flags to check as far as MayDay goes. It's been about a month with no income now.

One thing I keep coming back to regarding MayDay is the hint that MC dropped in his video - unfortunately it was a very vague hint as usual. He said if you're impacted you should ensure your site has enough 'unique content'. When I look at my still-ranking competitors, they do generate reams of text description for each product - I assume they pay folks in India pennies to churn this garbage out, but it's 'unique'.

I cringe at the idea of adding this type of thing to my site. My users already know what they seek, they want certain basic info. The Unique content and functionality I provide is price analysis/history, inventory segmentation, alerts - nobody else offers this in my market. Yet the site is thin on human-written editorial and it would degrade the user experience to stuff that in.

Does this resonate with anyone else? I'm thinking of trying an experiment to scrape brief comments like tweets, run my own relevancy/cleanup alg, and attach 'comments from the web' type text to the inventory.
It couldn't possibly hurt traffic :-)