| We had a site get hit hard by Panda 4.0 but we are not surprised. About a 35% drop overnight May 20th. An observation that we have made over the years is that significant changes to Google's algorithms always seem to soften in the subsequent months for us and we return to a high level in the Google SERPs. The site in question is a site where we curate free crafts projects and patterns which my spouse and I began in the 90's with our family and friends. The idea was to gather together excellent crafts projects on little known mostly small sites with the criteria that they are free, complete, usually require no email/login and are within two clicks of us. We still update it every week. Over the years we have used user feedback to make design decisions. For example, when Pinterest became popular we got a lot of feedback to use masonry instead of tables for our images/links and lately we've been moving to make it fully responsive because we get a lot of feedback from tablet users. The only time we were manually penalized by Google involved an issue where we had ignored our user's complaints about so they were right and we were wrong. We fixed it. Our site looks thin to an algorithm and we almost always get hit by large algorithm changes but over the subsequent months, the site always moves back up and ranks very well. We can only imagine that this means the algorithm is somehow tempered by our visitor's behavior (we use adsense and analytics so they see all) and is not simply a switch that is thrown and left on. I have to wonder how much MetaFilter has done to gather user feedback. The answer to their problem may be there. Disclosure: The site described is AllCrafts |