moehits - 8:41 pm on Jan 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

I did some cleaning, for controlled study reasons, I'll outline history a bit.

It was redesigned in June, the redesign included hidden text, that's when it was penalized. I suspect there were a few other things at play, but that was the major problem.

I started on it in August

1. Removed hidden text
2. many pages looked like duplcates very thin on content, we added a lot of original content.
3. removed reciprocal links, many were to spammy sites.

4. Did a re-inclusion request around October, nothing happened.

5. Over the past few months, got hundreds of high quality links, it had many high quality links before, ( so it should have at least ranked for some terms ) but also was submitted to a ton of bad directories so I suspect it had some penalties there, or at least a lot of the legit work was discounted.

Nothing major happened until today, my first guess was either a time based penalty ( 6 months ) expired, and / or it was re-evaluated by the spam system or human evaluator and passed.