drall - 7:46 pm on Jan 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

Wow, well said Reno. Wheel you are spot on. We write content for our users, just wrapped up a tutorial for crafting in a certain online game I probably spend to much time playing. I think I spent 30 hours writing it.

Knowing that this tutorial will probably be buried like the rest of our content on page 3 of Googles results now is upsetting but isnt going to influence what we do. We have been doing the same thing day in and day out for over a decade and long before Google was born and we will continue to do the same thing because that is what our direct users come to us for.

This algo change is not scary to me, Google Inc. being the judge as to what is considered low quality and what isnt, well that is scary.

On a side note I wonder if this a domain level trigger. Matt said this is only effecting a very small section of search but our entire site got the smackdown. Maybe something like a certain % of this domains content is found elsewhere x times and then the entire domains serps gets a smackdown because of it?

Even though our content is 100% unique many big game companies forums and blogs take excerpts and snippets of our guides and post them in the official game forum but with a ref to us. We also get scraped like crazy and try to fight it but it's damn near impossible when you are a popular site. Probably millions of scrapers out there with fragments of our content.