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Medlin04.  I agree with Robert, it's a cost-reward trade-off.

Since it's the paving industry we're talking about, how many nice relevant sites can there be ?

I doubt there are very many that carry substantially higher PA/DA.  Your customer's competition will face the same problem of available relevant links.

Unfortunately, G's continuing attack "freshness", Panda, and now Penguin will continue to favor the sites Robert dubbed "PA-60" sites which have high "authority" but are usually written by content writers who, no matter how good they are, often do not fully understand the subject however experienced and skilled the writer may be.

No matter how anyone characterizes it, G's culling websites.  Saves on search, helps sell adwords.   If there is a huge (intentional) weakness in G's formula, it's underweighting relevant small business links out to other sites in the same business.  I believe this part of the algo is intentional because the big sites often sell the advertising which directs the traffic to these small business.

The penalty varies widely by page.   The penalty appears to hit certain keywords associated with individual pages.

Been wondering about this myself.   Did anyone who had a site that was otherwise clean get slammed by Penguin because of IBL's derived from widgets?

@ John - Sounds like a useful experiment for someone who can code and wants YouMoz exposure.

@ G.L.A. -  G's "business model" is to use search to sell ads and not to provide the "best" results.   I would not be surprised at all if G is now penalizing large contact forms, contact forms above the fold, etc. at least as harshly as some of the earlier Panda updates penalized over use of AdWords.  If Adwords ads are not immune under certain conditions, why would contact forms for the site itself be treated more generously assuming all other things are equal ?

@ Ryan :  Have you actually observed 301 redirects associated with transferring content to a new domain result in a penalty against the new site ?

I ask because one of the potential Pennguin recovery strategies is to transfer the best content on the old (penalized) site to a new site and start afresh.  Part of the plan is to use 301 redirects so that G does not mistake the pages transferred to the new site as duplicating what G believes is still on the old (penalized) site.

I understand that G may do whatever it arbitrarily wants to its algo.  For those of us with large (long tail) sites, creating a new site from scratch to protect our sites from further algo changes may not be the correct choice unless there is already a penalty that you described.

By the way, if penalties do pass through a 301, some of us have suddenly valuable domains available for sale to the ethically challenged. (LOLZ)

Nathan -  Someone recently posted a thread on BHW which suggests Penguin penalized sites similar to what you're describing.  (The examples are worth looking at and comparing to your site.)  Other people are insisting that Penguin does not apply to any on page variables.  Without setting up some throw away sites and testing, I do not know the answer and wish I did.

@Prestige : thanks for sharing this.

Why is everyone criticizing the blogspot site that ranks No. 1?  It is a partial match domain which does not employ any SEO "tricks".  Therefore, not subject to the over optimization penalty.  Nor is the site plagued by paid links, link exchanges, or comment spam. (Well, the comments probably started yesterday).  Plus, look at all the "buzz" this site is getting.   At G, any press is good press (no matter how adverse).

On the serious side, I wonder whether the site benefited from the new site boost in a topic area where I'd assume all of the competition got heavily penalized.

Has anyone observed the effect on G organic traffic when a site which has little or no location information suddenly registers with the reputable "local" directories?

I am especially curious about results observations based upon G's behavior during the past several months.

It might be a hosting problem (the host is performing some non-routine mantenance) or possibly even a HUGE change in G's algo but I've observed a huge drop in my traffic after claiming a couple of the local listings earlier this week.  Until then, I doubt G had associated my site with my city.

A couple of other explanations are possible but the timing leaves me to doubt it's a coincidence.

T.I.A.

When I want to access the "official" site without having to dig through the commercialized sites on the SERPS, I use Bing instead of G.   Much more pleased with the results when I'm not searching for "long tail" phrases.  Vanoogle (your idea of a toggle to get "pure" results) is a great  idea but G wants ALL the ad revenues it can bleed out of a page.

Egol - I am a layman when it comes to SEO.   I began noticing strange results around 3 weeks ago.  I was not observant enough to begin to define the issue and did not think to run your experiment.  I believe my results began to change (or changed more frequently) around the time of the March 23, algo update.  Hope this helps.

Seeing this too.   Ran my state and then "Kayak".   Similar SERPs to what you described (using IE).

I thought Google has been experimenting with geo-locating searches with increasing frequency.

Opened FireFox and searched for "Kayak".  Positions 1 & 2 were Kayak manufacturers.

Ran second search under my state.  Then immediately searched for "Kayak" and got new SERP results.  First two positions are now Kayak Tour Operations in my state.

One of my sites competes against a web developer who set up a network of approximately 150 sites.  Most (probably 80%) are in the same business.  The other 20% or so are geographically relevant.  Crap sites (no blogs or useful info) but they link to each other.  Developer also set up several directories with only his sites and the name of the city and the service in the domain names.   Works surprisingly well for the owners of his sites.

How long can this continue before it topples?  Worth reporting?

Yes ! (I apologize for the double posting).

When I read that part of BMR's post, I heard Claude Raines saying "I'm shocked that gambling is going on" and Peter Lorre saying "Your winnings sir".  B.S. indeed.

Jason : I've been wondering about the cannibalization issue too.   It seems possible.   Does anyone have any experience with the changes in SERPs on a strong site which started SEO for local well into the site's   existence ?  If so, I'd like to hear about the experience.

A lot depends upon your goals and the level of competition.  Do you want your best videos next to ads for competitors or your competitors' videos?

I plan to do some of both.  I would not want YouTube to outrank my site for the more unique content which I believe will convert better.   (Similar to Egol's reminders about not giving your best content to article hubs or even guest postings).   I'll accept the traffic from the YouTube videos and try to steer viewers to the complete video library available only on wwwmysitecom.

@ Brian - I wondered about the same thing.  Today's Moz SERPs report shows changes similar to what you described.  Bing results are very volatile for my site(s) so I can't be "sure".

Cypra correctly points out that faster sites make for a better user experience and Alan pointed out how inexpensive CDN can be.   I installed CDN on a site that already uses WP3TC.  Page load speeds cut in half but the bounce rate (which is very high) dropped by only 1 or 2%.

Has anyone who has multiple sites sampled their bounce rates before and after they installed CDN?

Wayne : I share your concern for allowing users to post comments without hastles and approve every comment.  There ought to be a widget that compares the commenter's IP Address and cross references it against a list of known Bots or spammers.   If you find something off-list, please PM me.

Thanks Martijn.   Info in manual is very helpful in visualizing a lot of issues.