hitchhiker - 10:36 pm on Aug 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

I should probably kick in here - cheers for all the feedback, few great reads in there. But I should probably update this a little:

1) Our system is extremely complex, among the many thousands of decisions it makes during render we have rules and processes for:

- no ads on blank pages, infact we dont show ads until 2 replies

- link quality internally never focuses users on 'blank' pages - i dont think we actually have any blank pages! - We auto-301 anything that has expired back to a near match.

- quality assertions based on natural language analysis of our content, it naturally focuses itself on high grade stuff

- browser aware content (low grade browser DO NOT get the same scripts) - i dont care whether Google thinks that's cloaking.

- the 10s thing is a problem with how GOOGLE measure page speed, we'll adjust to suit them. Our interaction time is 400-800ms on average.

- we're not resisting change, or format changes, we actually have to slow down change cycles because it affects END USERS -- we have members who spend thousands of hours, with upwards of 50k posts. We are careful not to let G decide our page layouts.

2) We don't let this kind of thing freak us out - we're already almost back - sways like this are an inevitable part of being on the net - this thread was a bit of a slip up on my part.

3) Im never going to no-index at that kind of micro level - that's google's job. I'm going to =focus= on the million things needed to move forward.

We were 35k down, we're now about 20k down - my guess is we'll be back to 'normal' within a few weeks. It was nothing but a slight change in algos that affected us.

One curiosity is that we have never been hit by any panda or penguin, we always got a (big) boost of traffic during those events.

My guess is whatever hit us now, was a reversal of panda/penguin as had been described over the last year or so.