Out of curiosity, can you name some of the legitimate businesses that were affected? I thought the algo only targeted content farms and sites that regurgitated other peoples content.
You need to increase the # of links you have from the homepage - I would suggest getting to the 100 internal link point by finding more ways to tag your jobs you have under "See All 1206 Entry Level Employers", which I imagine is driving most of your search traffic.
Divide that by category types and link from the sidebar - this will pass linkjuice more efficiently and improve your traffic.
That's a really good suggestion. I mostly use the tag pages to flow linkjuice throughout the site, and it seems to work pretty well. I'll think more about how I can improve my site architecture. But I was doing pretty well until Thursday.
The really interesting thing is that http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/ has seen no change in traffic. Its architecture is nearly identical, and much of the content is shared across both sites (because I built the sites for humans, not search engines). There's a decent chance that this is causing the problem, but I can't understand why ODOJ would get hit instead of ODOI. Even content that isn't partially duplicated on ODOI is getting hit, so it's either a domain level filter/penalty based on duplicate content, or it's not the issue.
Right now I'm thinking a lot about how to fix whatever Google doesn't like, but it's really hard when you can't be sure. I can't really afford to do significant testing (and you can't actually run a good experiment with a real site). For now I'm going to keep investigating, and work on building links. That's always a good time investment.
> but I can't understand why ODOJ would get hit instead of ODOI.
Wild guess: "job" is a highly competitive keyword subject to lots of scammy black hats ("work from home for $$$!!!"), while "internship" is much more clear of the scum?
One property my company holds, http://www.dentalcompare.com has been affected. It's a classic product comparison site (with a lot of problems) but there is not "farming" of content. Every company provides their products and every article is original or at most, a small abstract.
