Our site, store.mind-body-spirit-central.com, is an e-commerce site catering to a niche market. The site is structured with product category pages linking to more descriptive individual product pages. For the latter we've worked hard to write original content to set ourselves apart from most of our competition.

Since the new algorithm was implemented traffic has dropped by over 50%. We no longer rank at all for many searches we ranked well for previously.

Even though we're constantly adding new pages, the overall number of Google-indexed pages has also dropped by about 50%, according to site:search. The Google crawl rate has slowed considerably.

What makes this doubly-perplexing is the same thing happened last year with the May Day algorithm, which effectively put us out of business for several months until one day our rankings, number of indexed pages, and Google crawl rate suddenly bounced back. We can appreciate Google's wanting to have high-quality SERPs, but the feeling of being on a roller coaster ride while an algorithm is fine tuned is a not a very comfortable one.

We've also noticed that the best of our competition - the ones we admire the most for the originality of their content - have been similarly affected. This tells us that clearly something's not right here. If someone is shopping for goods and Google is limiting their visible options, it's like putting up a roadblock on Main Street to prevent the shopper from reaching certain stores. Is that treating the shopper fairly?

Thank you for listening.

Marc