dangerman - 8:49 am on Apr 27, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hey happy birthday Oak and any others that were among the first to be hit by this penalty back on April 26th last year.

I got all nostalgic and checked my rankings this morning in the hope that Google (excuse the anthropromorphism) decided to give me a nice present. Imagine my surprise to see mydomain.com still languishing at No. 32.

I note that until around a month ago, it was always preceded in the SERPS by an internal page one page ahead. Seems now not to be the case.

I have embarked on a long-term ( and part-time, I should add) strategy of rewriting the several thousand pages on my site. Am about a third the way through. This is the very last strategy, before the site gets dismembered.

My theory is that since everything else has been analysed, optimised etc etc the only thing left is the quality of the content. Many pages have been duplicated by other sites over the past couple of years (was all original except for a few pages that have long gone) and anyone who advises that the easiest way to deal with this is to send in DMCA complaints is talking rot. Try doing that with several hundred sites.

So have not given up yet, but could be a while before I file the final chapter.