I think this only the beginning of the bad news due to this algo change. There are many legitimate businesses that have been seriously impacted by traffic drops and we'll probably see many more layoffs and budget cuts.
Similarly, an algorithmic change in Google which cleans up the long tail can help businesses in a variety of fashions. I mean, I'm not actually seeing major changes yet, but if my rankings for five thousand variations of "how do I make X bingo cards" over the universe of ten Xs which content farms deem valuable to target, that gives me additional resources to develop value-producing things elsewhere (like, e.g., subsidizing the development of AR, or ramping up my publication efforts from my current speed of ~250 to year to a higher number on progressively more obscure topics which real teachers really do want to teach lessons on tomorrow).
Similarly, improving the value of the SERPs for any field of endeavor or user community results in an increase in the aggregate number of searches as user behavior changes. That is a change that lifts all boats.
SEO can mean "help make my site easy for google to honestly evaluate and judge the quality of my content" or it can mean "game google into thinking my content is what people want to see even though they probably don't".
I can see how having a better index creates value but I'm not sure how SEO contributes to a better index. It seems like google changed the rules, some companies are doing worse, some are better (zero sum) but hopefully the index is better and people can find what they want (unlocking value). Is that what you're getting at?
Alright, by analogy: you understand how a properly functioning economy has positive effects for participants in the stock market, right? Economic growth means investors win. Do you understand that a properly functioning stock market also helps the broader economy, even if we assume that each participant in the market is just trying to manipulate the market into serving their own selfish interests? The market converges on more efficient allocation of capital than other sorts of non-market capital allocation schemes we have tried.
Google's tremendous expertise with algorithms is one reason why the experience of searching the Internet generally does not suck. The input people create to rank on Google is another reason. Good, descriptive titles are the single easiest on-page way to influence rankings on leaf pages -- they're also the single easiest way for an engine to tell what a page is about without linking signals. Thus, the practice of putting titles on pages improves the index. What's the first thing your SEO consultant is going to do? Look at your title tags. Systemwide, this converges on an Internet where most pages that people actually end up seeing have good, descriptive titles.
Divide that by category types and link from the sidebar - this will pass linkjuice more efficiently and improve your traffic.
The really interesting thing is that http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/ has seen no change in traffic. Its architecture is nearly identical, and much of the content is shared across both sites (because I built the sites for humans, not search engines). There's a decent chance that this is causing the problem, but I can't understand why ODOJ would get hit instead of ODOI. Even content that isn't partially duplicated on ODOI is getting hit, so it's either a domain level filter/penalty based on duplicate content, or it's not the issue.
Right now I'm thinking a lot about how to fix whatever Google doesn't like, but it's really hard when you can't be sure. I can't really afford to do significant testing (and you can't actually run a good experiment with a real site). For now I'm going to keep investigating, and work on building links. That's always a good time investment.
Wild guess: "job" is a highly competitive keyword subject to lots of scammy black hats ("work from home for $$$!!!"), while "internship" is much more clear of the scum?
/\ For non-URLed discussion of dozens or possibly hundreds of legit sites which were hit.
Today's Wired article gives some more specific examples:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/google-spam-side-effe...