AlyssaS - 9:13 pm on Mar 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

This is the thing. Has there been anybody that's stated they've been able to restore their rankings? The only site that I know of is cultofmac, and they went out things in a very public way, which I don't think will work for most people.

Well, from my experience dealing with G's filters in the past, they take seven days from when they re-crawl your site to when the results shows up in the search rankings.

Some people may have made changes immediately, but a lot of people have wasted time hoping things improve.

Also - it's hard to isolate the effect of a change unless you only do one change a week, or if you have many sites affected, do a different change on each site to find out which change is working.

Also, if your site has been dropped, it's hard to get them to re-crawl you, you end up wasting days in frantic manoeuvres to get the bot to notice you.

FWIW, I had one page drop from page 1 to page 3 on 24th Feb because the backlinks to that page were from article directories that got hurt (eg Ezine). I made some new backlinks from good places, and I am at #10 on page 1. Not as good as the pre-algo #6 but an improvement nevertheless. It took 10 days for that to happen. Hope this helps.