drall - 1:36 am on Apr 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

The alexa graphs for the biggest sites in my niche look like the grim reaper passed by them. 60-90% traffic reductions per site and these are huge sites, some of them owned by fortune 500 companies. One site dropped from 25 million uniques per month to 12 million alone.

What's crazy is that these sites have been the industry gold standard even before Google was born. Very high quality sites filled with unique content made by seasoned staff. You would all know them by name. How these sites fit the mold of low quality is beyond me completely.

I cant even imagine how much staff will be let go as a result of this. I dont agree with the whole argument that you shouldnt depend on one source blahblahblah, Google has a virtual monopoly in terms of internet traffic and everyone knows it.

I still see the scrapers, content spinners and shallow garbage. Seems to me only real sites got hit in my niche.

I can only imagine what would happen if the govt did some "electronic discovery" in Googles books.