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We've seen a significant decrease in google.com traffic for stem query terms like [botox] and [invisalign].  We have an active community with tens of thousands of cosmetic treatment reviews, photos and Q&A, so we're not a shallow scraper site.

I don't think we've been specifically punished.  Instead, it looks like Google simply reset the difficulty of competing for commercial stem query terms back to what it was in 2008.  I looked at google traffic by keyword between the end of February 2009 and the last few days, and it seemed clear that our overall traffic has increased significantly but most of that traffic has been for long tail searches.  Traffic for stem query terms are generally flat or down.

In January and early February, we were ranking on page 1 for many of those commercial stem query terms for the first time, but it looks like those days are over.

When you click on a Thumbtack organic result, there's a pop-up modal on the landing page. Is this allowed by Google?

E.g. Go to these SERPS and click on the first Thumbtack result. The landing page has this modal appear. Is this likely to hurt their rankings?

Good ideas, Dave.  Your housecleaning ideas prompted us to delete 2,500 old skin care product pages that we had converted to static pages after switching off Drupal.  It constituted 1% of our pages and visitors, but the poor metrics from those pages could have acted as a bad signal (2,500 pages is a lot for a human to create) and tarnished our overall site.  1% rotten is still too much.

Good idea about bringing back more content onto the Category/Subject pages.  We're going to do the same for our main landing pages.  The data I've seen indicates site speed seems is only used to break ties between pages with a similar ranking.

• Eric (CTO at RealSelf.com)