The launch of the anti-spam campaign this week was a targeted one, Google web spam boss Matt Cutts in his personal blog. Slightly more than two percent of queries were changed in some way, but less than half a percent of search results changed enough for someone to notice, he explained.   "The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site's content," he wrote.

While the changes may have a minimal impact on the eyeballs of searchers, that's not the case for some webmasters. "We saw a huge 10-20 [percent] drop in almost all positions for our biggest and oldest site," reported "drall" at the .

"It doesnt matter if it is all 100% unique with tons of backlinks and really well laid out or simply an image," drall continued. "Everything got whacked."

Ironically, drall's out-of-date, ad-filled sites were "humming along fine."

"So whats the message here Google?" drall asked. "Write an in-depth article that takes 3 days to complete and is linked to by hundreds of companies and gov agencies and loose all positions site wide while our out of date half-baked and useless content does fine?" (sic)