Great replies by bartosimpsonio, Scritty and other posters (sorry, can't remember all the usernames!).
From my experience, all our WH sites have gone up with no exception. We have built a tiered pyramid with unique content on all our sites. Our tier 1s are manually written to a high degree of quality, and these sites (Tier 1) are ranking for specific keywords we ensured to target; the monthly searches for these keywords are 2000 to 3000, low to medium competition, and we are number 1 on page 1 for 20+ Tier 1 sites since late September. These Tier 1 sites have at the same time links from Tier 2 sites with manually-written content (outsourced); the content is written to a good degree of quality plus some high-quality spam (LOL, as if you could call spam "high quality"). The sites for our Tier 3 level are also manually written to a decent standard (good grammar, rich content). Those Tier 3 sites are half OK backlinks and half all-go spam.
What I have noticed from all our sites:
1) Hummingbird can crawl content and index it to a high degree of relevance upon SERPS
2) Long tail keywords are now more relevant than ever due to the increase in mobile-phone users. Our traffic exploded mostly due to LTK that are made up of 3 to 5 words
3) Spun content is taking a hit if not done properly. My belief is that the Hummingbird got smarter with reading content although the Hummingbird is yet to be a human reader
4) Long articles with plenty of associations are the winners. We are getting traffic for keywords we didn't target or even mentioning articles, albeit the targeted keywords of the articles were similar to the keywords we're getting traffic from
5) Spam still works, but we have to be smarter about it
6) Churn and burn still works, and I believe more people are being pushed into this methodology due to the fact Google is always shuffling sites with its updates. I even did some churn and burn early September as 2 of our WH money sites got mildly hit late August with a 20% drop in Google traffic; coincidentally, these 2 sites are now killing it and have doubled traffic since late September. My belief is Google was tweaking the Hummingbird all through September, just in time for the Penguin 2.1 (notice the time frame between Hummingbird's announcement and Penguin 2.1's announcement is a mere week)
These are some of my observations based on my/our WH sites and also on some test BH sites I have that either tanked or stayed more or less leveled. I could be wrong in some of my beliefs or thoughts; feel free to correct me.
By the way, our money sites compete in a 20k-to-50k-m/searches environment with fierce competition.
My 2 pesos, my friends.
Cheers
Anyone have all 100% unique hand-written articles as backlinks get hit? Anything spun does not count. If you used GSA/SENuke/Ultimate Demon this does not count.
This also assumes that your money site content is also unique and not spun. And is compliant to the previous Panda/Penguin updates for no duplicate content and overoptimization.
Thanks
We have uniquely-written content in all sites of our tiered pyramid. Was a lot of effort, but I wanted non-spun content in all 100+ sites. We have benefited plenty since late September (both money sites and Tier 1 sites) as explained previously in my post, but our competitors with spun content for Tier 2s were hit. Mind you, their pyramids were fairly crap; I'm sure well-done spun content in a well-done tier pyramid still works.
