I have a page responsible for 400-500 visits per day by people looking for some specific information. Over the past couple of days a feedback box has been appearing from a .eu site for google.com searches that is so irrelevant it's scary. If you know nothing about the subject it might look like it's helpful but in reality it's like reading instructions on setting up a Christmas tree while you are trying to buy a ticket to Florida.
Anyway, I'm sure Google will eventually work out that the page is rather useless and it's put there by a big brand merchant to try and expand out of a purely product oriented site but the end result is the same, 50% traffic gone, my page is still #1 but it is now below the fold. People hitting up the feedback box link are obviously clicking on the merchants other links or doing another search, perhaps both.
My content is in a few other feedback boxes on various subjects as well but I'm under a box more often than in it now. FYI - 4 ads + a feedback box = the full screen on your average desktop computer, #1 goes below the fold.
Also problematic, in my niche anyway, is that virtually all of the data ending up in those feedback boxes is inside of old html tables with divs, virtually none of it is from things like unordered lists. Should I go back to positioning my best content in tables and tds? Is this the future, or rather the end, of ranking naturally to receive traffic?
