tedster - 12:35 am on Dec 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

brinked - have you done any studies for exact match queries, before and after Oct 22?

It seems to me that one of the steps Google took was designed to stop sites from ranking by auto-generating content by mashing up long tail keyword tool output with article spinning. There were so many sites getting long tail traffic from schemes like this that they had to react. So I can see why exact matches might have suffered.