I’ve just released a very big change to Carsurvey.org.

I’ve spent almost a year and a half trying to escape the effects of Google’s Panda algorithm, with no luck so far.

Having cleaned up the design and ads as much as possible, the only thing left is to try to remove content from the site that may be triggering the Panda algorithm, due to a perceived low quality level. I’ve been doing this manually over the last year, but with so much content on the site, it’s taking too long.

My new solution is to analyse every piece of content on the site with an automated script, which looks for signals that may be indicative of poor quality. Things like unusual sentence lengths, strange punctuation or capitalisation. Content that exhibits enough of these signals has now been removed from the site, pending manual review. In total, about 15,000 reviews and 38,000 comments have been removed. Reviewing and restoring all of that content is likely to take several years.

Sadly, there will be a lot of false positives as a result of this process; perfectly good reviews and comments that just happened to have some characteristics that my script was looking for. If anyone is concerned about the fate of a particular review or comment, please email me (steven@carsurvey.org), and I’ll prioritise it for restoration to the site.