alika - 1:10 pm on Jan 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

Got hit on the 19th. About 50% drop in traffic for our main site, which went live in 1999.

Above the fold contains the following:

- Header (logo on the left, 486x60 on the right)
- Leaderboard
- Left narrow column: first thing is an Adlinks, then button ad
- Center column: featured article
- Right wide column: first thing is an Sponsored Link, followed by a medium rectangle

Which is what many sites have. We're not like the "extreme website with 90% of ads." The difference, however, is that ours is a butt-ugly site. It was made in Frontpage -- and continues to be updated in Frontpage. No CSS. No prettiness. I'm not a programmer or web developer so loads of HTML errors.

We haven't updated it because it works for us. It earns a lot of advertising revenues. So we were in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mode.

Plus, it gets a lot of mentions -- our articles have been cited several times in New York Times, Washington Post and other leading publications. We got links even from the Department of State. At one point, it even got a PR7. So this is not the "sludge of the Web" type of site. But it is ugly.

The irony is that we are planning to move it to Wordpress this year, and I've started moving a few of the content already.

If we are indeed hit by this algorithm, then we need to move our timetable quicker and get everything done sooner than we had planned.