Soon after all that hassle, my site suddenly lost 60% of its traffic. From what I can gather, mine is one of the quality sites that produce original content that has been mistakenly penalized in the Panda / Farmer / Whichever Other updates.
Among the reasons I say my site is a quality site that produces original content, in accordance with this post at the Google Webmaster Central Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...) and with all the logic I can apply to the subject, are:
-- The site contains over 1,700 posts published in the last 15 months. I wrote around 1,550 of them myself. The remainder are written by three other occasional authors, who are colleagues and friends of mine. There's no 'outsourcing' of content creation or anything of that ilk.
-- I spend tons of hours every day researching and writing the content that appears on my site. Every app review on the site is 100% original content (http://ipadinsight.com/category/ipad-app-reviews), as are all posts published.
-- I do consider myself an expert on the subject my site covers - the iPad. I have been writing app reviews,accessory reviews tips, how-to posts on it ever since it launched. I've appeared on ABC World News and numerous radio programs as an iPad and Apple expert. I've been a contributing author for iPhone and iPad Life magazine (printed publication) since their debut issue - writing expert tips and tricks posts, buyer's guide articles, and more. I'm listed in Robert Scoble's Twitter list of best tech people to follow. Blue-chip app publishers and accessory vendors approach me to write about their products. The Daily (the first iPad only newspaper) contacted me before their app even hit the App Store, as do many leading publishers. I've been a beta tester for many top iOS apps for years. I participate regularly at several leading iPad and iOS forums. I'm not saying any of this to boast, but in an effort to establish that I'm a blogger who is enormously passionate about the subject I cover, and someone who is respected in the area (mobile tech) that I write on.
-- My site is a long-standing member of the Got-OATS group of sites (http://www.gotoats.org/) that seek to uphold and promote the highest ethics in app reviews. We never accept money for reviews or coverage, and add disclosure statements to our reviews to indicate whether we received a promo code for an app reviewed, or a sample unit of an accessory reviewed.
-- I spend a lot of time on every single post, on researching, on testing apps and whatever else I'm covering, on ensuring that spelling and grammar are spot-on, on providing good screencaps of apps in action, and every other detail I can think of.
-- I use a great cache-ing plugin on my site and do my best, with help from a few Wordpress experts, to keep the site fast and clean.
-- I currently have close to 4,500 RSS subscribers and over 3,000 Twitter followers for the site's account.
-- Before my recent sudden traffic fall off a cliff due to Panda, my site had around 80-100,000 unique visitors per month.
As for search results and scraper sites, I am still often seeing horrendous spam sites ranking above me for recent posts. Here is just one quick example on a recent post I wrote about iPad rivals, where several scraper sites rank above mine, including one (ipads101.com) which I have submitted 3 spam reports on via Google Webmaster over the last two months, and had zero response:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I run a good site. I pour hours of effort and my heart and soul into it. And I think it has been very wrongly assessed by whichever new algorithm.