johnhh - 11:28 pm on May 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

Recovery - what recovery. Slight uplift last weekend all gone.

We have pages that are still in the top 10, even #1 - we have massive movements on other pages with the same basic design.

Traffic still down 50% after a slight uplift last weekend.

Sales are down 70% - all staff but one laid off - all sub-contactors cancelled.

Steps taken:

All short descriptions errors in WMT ( if you actually believe any figures from there ) fixed - any server problems fixed, any obvious dead links fixed, content found elsewhere ( via datafeeds ) noindexed.

All adsense taken off - all adwords campaigns cancelled.

Trial pages with slight changes A:B tested no conclusive results.

Well I guess unless we make a fantastic recovery next week thats it for us - after 12-14 years aprox., starting with AOL homepages as we couldn't afford our own servers !

Direct competition all hit as well - which begs the question are .com's doing better than country level domains.

All original content and page designs that must have cost us £ hundred and thousands to £ low millions over the years and many, many, late nights and weekends.

So its a joke when you see boiler-plate pages ranking higher that say "do you have information on 'green widgets' let us know ?" - value to user zero - value to google greater.

Unless you have massive backing it may be all over for small independant companies like us.

I'm not going to the argument that google doesn't owe you a living without companies like us ( and you !) google would have nothing to show

If there is any improvement I'll post back - otherwise - many thanks to all here for their assistance over the years , and of course....

Thanks for all the fish.

<rant> rant over </rant>