Dean here (can’t seem to log out of Ellen’s CP and my new pc is still “coming”)
Great info Aryt. I have always been a great believer in targeting less competetive keywords and if google is going to keep this mix of competetive terms it will get us off to a good start.
IMHO there must be a few of the big brains closely watching google’s antics as the time is surely ripe for competing engines to get off their bums a google is clearly forgetting the origin of their popularity.
One interesting thing I found is our two oldest and most google affected sites in the stats was:
While the main search terms were down overall traffic was UP for november and december is looking great so far. Our lesser ranked terms were steady and there was and increase in traffic from the lesser SE’s (stats only show a few so some traffic is of undetermined origin).