Panda: should publishers bother fighting back?    Take
TravBuddy, a "free site for people who love to explore the world
around them." It's innocuous enough. According to Eric
Bjorndahl, the site's co-founder, TravBuddy is home to a large,
vibrant community, and the site has been a Webby Honoree for
four years in a row.  But TravBuddy was caught up in the Panda
pandemonium in February, and Bjorndahl and his team have been
trying to recover ever since. To that end they have:    • Cut
back on pages light on content.   • Dealt with duplicate
content.   • Improved navigation.   • Reduced the amount of
advertising they display.   • Taken steps to minimize the amount
of TravBuddy content that is syndicated or scraped by other
sites.  The result? Zip, zilch, nada. As Bjorndahl puts it, it's
"almost as if Google has decided we should get X number of
visitors every week, regardless of what we do."  Now, it's
certainly possible that all the hard work will eventually bear
fruit. Google doesn't 'forgive' quickly, and we s