Thank you for your thoughful and informative videos. I learned a few things, and you’re doing a great job of interfacing Google with the masses.

My comment is essentially to add my voice to the comments above, our site also experienced a huge drop on July 27th, and most terms we were doing well with are buried very deep in the SERPs now. Most of our pages had a PR of 0 for a long time, and now since the problem began we have had reassignments to PR4 and PR5, which is great however now the pages can’t be found anymore with any of the product based keyword searches that used to put us on the first page – eg “fm band expander nz”

Can you please elaborate on what’s happened? Sitemaps shows no problems, and the site (link provided as post URI) is a legit e-commerce site without any nasty SEO tricks going on. I hope you can help and I appreciate your time in tracking down what the issue could be.

Many thanks,
Mike Glaser

What about all the rumors that you are banning sites that include a directory. I understand that a site putting up a directory may raise a flag with Goooogle on going after more keywords than the site deserves,
But?? What about a site that covers a niche well and has a directory about that subject? How does Gooooogle determan a ban like that?
As we see directory niches loosing out search engine placement by news related searches and bloggers?

I have to echo what Beth posted above (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/vidyo/#comment-63480).

I’ve tried my best to avoid doing SEO and instead focus on developing high quality content that has been good enough to attract links from .GOV sites (e.g. CDC & NASA), .MIL sites and official department pages for universities I could never hope to gain entry in. On July 27th I disappeared from Google’s search results overnight and lost 80% of my traffic. This has resulted in a devastating loss of revenue that is creating very real financial hardships.

Since July 27th, my focus has been almost entirely focused on trying to figure out what possible things I did to deserve such punishment and resolve those problems. This means I am not focusing my energies on generating new content for users as I normally do. The July 27th incident is forcing honest, hard working web publishers, like myself, who normally avoid SEO into doing SEO so that our sites don’t look like they have been SEO’d — this is perverse.

I feel like I have been tried and convicted of being an SE spammer without even knowing what the evidence is against me or having anyway to defend my self.

Many of us really can not wait a few weeks let alone until the end of the summer for a resolution to this problem — the financial impact is just too great. For me personally, I’m about to go into my highest traffic highest revenue time of the year. Telling me I have to wait four weeks to see things sort themselves out is like telling a toy store they have to wait a month to have their power and heat restored three weeks before Christmas.

Hey Matt, you forgot to mention Search Engine Forums, one of the original search engine forums out there–way before SEW, IHY, etc. etc..