Richie0x - 5:50 pm on Mar 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

Back in the day we used to do something called LINKING which is how others found similar sites. Now if you do LINKING big bad Google threatens you with a penalty.

I think what has happened here is that Google has gone feral on us.

Publishers are now penalised for displaying too many adverts when the number of paid-for results on a Google SERP can often outweigh the number of organic results on it. We're also being penalised for linking even though Google's entire reason for being is based on links.

This update has cut my traffic by more than a quarter.

So what I am going to do, is remove hundreds of links to Google maps and Google Streetview from my website, and direct visitors to Multimap instead. Then I'm going to replace Google site search with Bing's, strip the analytics code from my pages and close my analytics account down. Basically I'm going to systematically eradicate everything from my website that promotes or encourages Google. :) Except adsense, which can gtfo just as soon as I find a viable alternative...