I used to work for a company that sold furniture online. We were good but the majority of our business came from the beloved serps. It hurt us dramatically when our boilerplate product copy, sent to all online retailers, counted against us as though we were spam. It was beyond my capabilities to develop a method to automatically reword the copy. Surprise, surprise. We started to pay people to write unique descriptions for the products that everyone on the net was carrying. Then affiliates would pick it up and screw us again. That's it. No happy ending. Company was bought by our most underhanded competitor. Now I do my own thing.
I should note we rode the Google gravy train for about 8 years before that happened. After "panda" the company couldnt afford to buy every bit of its traffic. I doubt that's what Google was shooting for with that update but it really changed some lives.
That's really an incredible story, and I doubt that it exists in a vacuum. I'd really like to see a piece about companies like yours and others that were impacted heavily by algorithm changes.
The part that probably bothers me the most is that if the MetaFilter founder didn't have a direct connection to Matt Cutts, it probably would've just been the end of his site at the scale he was at.
I should note we rode the Google gravy train for about 8 years before that happened. After "panda" the company couldnt afford to buy every bit of its traffic. I doubt that's what Google was shooting for with that update but it really changed some lives.