Our site went from ranking #8 for our target search "artist websites" to PAGE 440 of the results. Our listing for "how to sell art" just went away. There's been nothing but original content on our site for 10 years, and, among artists, we're considered one of the best sources of art marketing information, given that I owned an art gallery for 20 years and all of our other writers are professional artists. (and yet Google still has ehow ranked for "how to sell art".....yeah, I'm sure ehow knows a whole lot more than we do).
I'm saying this not to vent, but to concur with Aaron and others that there is something wrong. It may not hurt Google's business....the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business. Fortunately I've read HN long enough to know not to build my entire company on top of someone else's platform and, as much as it upsets me, we don't need Google. Bing (and Yahoo) have us at #3 for that same search ("artist websites"). We don't depend on search engines as our only source of marketing leads....nor even our main source.
The most frustrating thing is not even that it happens, but that they do not communicate. There's no way to find out WHAT happened. Nothing in Webmaster Tools. No way to pay for search support. I read the Google blog post with guidelines on how to structure content after Panda and, none of that applied to us, at least not that I could tell.
They say "just focus on users" and that's what we do, but I guess, that's BS.
I, frankly, think Google's gotten to big for their britches and as unlikely as it is to happen, I hope Bing, Blekko and yes, DuckDuckGo take some market share away. Windows is better for having OSX and Linux to compete with. Maybe Google would be a bit less "evil" with more competition too.
Sorry for the bit of the rant, I'm usually only a lurker here, but this article of Aaron's really hit close to home this week. At least there are a couple of relevant points buried in my little rant....I hope ;-)