If a high-quality site like Metafilter can be crushed by Google, what hope do other sites have?

For long-time web users, the layoffs announcement from Metafilter -- a pioneering online community that has been around since 1999 -- was a little like hearing that an old friend is in hospital with a fatal illness: founder Matt Haughey said that due to a dramatic decline in traffic and related advertising revenue, the site has had to lay off several of its moderators and is essentially on financial life-support.

And the name at the center of this drama likely won’t come as much of a surprise: Google. Haughey describes how traffic to the site suddenly cratered in mid-2012, with visits falling by more than 40 percent. At around the same time, Google was rolling out an update to its indexing algorithm -- an update known as Panda -- which was designed to promote high-quality content and down-grade spam sites, as well as those using a variety of search-engine optimization or SEO tricks.

As with most things involving Google and its algorithms, what happened to Metafilter is almost impossible to diagnose, because the search giant’s methods -- and the motivation for any changes -- are a black box. Haughey theorizes that the change occurred around the Panda update and was exacerbated by subsequent updates, but Search Engine Land founder and Google expert Danny Sullivan pointed out that the dramatic drop-off in traffic doesn’t really line up with any of the company’s major algorithm tweaks.