My eCommerce site features unique and hand written content. It was a labor of love built over 8 1/2 years. Each phrase, link, image was though out and executed with white hat techniques and was ranked highly, up until now. I don’t want to list my site for fear of further demotion and additional lost rankings. Over 65% of my traffic disappeared overnight. I thought about it and have analyzed what may have gone wrong and have come up with nothing substantial yet. What’s even more surprising is how poor the quality of many many search results has become. How many times can I see eHow, Wikapedia and Amazon results monopolize the results without being disappointed? If I wanted Amazon results, I would go to Amazon, If I wanted a guide I would use "how" or some other modifier in my search. It looks like the 800 pound Gorilla has stepped on a landmine and made themselves irrelevant. Trust is built over years, but lost in an instant.

When my wife was shopping online recently, she mentioned how poor the results were and how difficult it was to find anything. I showed her Bing and she said “can you make this come up every time I use my browser”. I made Bing her default search engine and she no longer uses Google. I believe this scenario will be repeated many more times in the coming months.