mhansen - 10:56 pm on Oct 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

Today, I noticed eBay and Amazon in several serps they have not been in prior to this weekend. The resulting pages are the exact type we try to avoid building for fear of penalties, and obviously promoted for their brand value!

We also noticed that several of our strongest, most aged, and well linked site pages, those we have spent the most time to provide the best info and user-experience (lowest bounce, most informative, etc) have all but disappeared from results since Friday. Other site pages are fine. They are still indexed and still deliver traffic, but much fewer of the same visitors they were designed for.

From a business owner perspective, Google seems to change the visitor profile they send us every day or 2 lately. Whether its Panda or one of the other 500 dials they choose to screw with, its very frustrating. I don't even know what to say. Googlebot is fully reindexing sites twice a month now... stuff we would block others for. Is it time to block Google, and remove them from our business decisions completely?

I am fully aware not to build a business on the back of free traffic from Google, but its really a catch-22... if you don't scale up to take care of the visitors they send you, you suffer through negative reviews. If you DO staff up to handle the demand, and they pinch off the flow, and you have to scale back and lay people off.

Google Consistency = Non-Existent.