great news! I have a question, the site that came back, had 0 visits during the penalty?
Hi, I was getting about a 1/4 of my traffic when I dropped down and had dipped in most places for my keywords, since coming back its went back up but has never managed to go back up to the 27k I used to get back in Sept, Oct last year and had slowly started to dip but come Nov 7th it went way down ( massive drop). I had had 2 negative SEO attacks on my site roundabout sept oct so I put my traffic loss down to that but come November 7th everything just tanked when I came back just before Xmas I was getting decent traffic but not back to the 27k
So id say although its back and gaining good traffic again it's nowhere as it used to be in Sept-Oct last year. I doubt it will ever get back to that as it seems I lost a lot of long-tail keywords and 2-word keywords to the likes of google books, eBay, Amazon, Pinterest etc..
My plan when I get time is to go through all the keywords I lost and see what is ranking in place of me and make web2s of the ones on that page for my keywords. I have been using a high authority parasite with this and it's great, getting decent traffic from that and ranking well. I have used a few tests with it and they have worked well giving me high rankings for a lot of words so what you lose in one you gain with the other.
The SERPs are so messed up now, yes I got a lot of my traffic back for now, but nowhere near what it used to be in August last year
I think we need to maybe wonder if these google books, good reads, etc are here to stay or for the time being anyway and if so then its time to just replicate that. I have started to do this looking at what is ranking what web2 and then making a web 2 in the same way but better and adding my own twists to it and I have to say google thinks its dinner time and laps them up.
So analyzing what is now where your keyword used to be and trying to replicate while you wait to see what's happening with your own site if google loves these nonsense sites so much then I shall feed it to them.
Even though I had dropped down I was still ranking at no1 for some words and I was still getting the 10 box trust under my site so i don't know how that is possible