freejung - 4:31 pm on Aug 18, 2011 (gmt 0)

However the section on ads doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the points.

How so? It jives perfectly with the first point about template footprint - if you have too many ads, your template is going to take up most of the page, because the ads will be part of the template.

The part I might disagree with is the idea that "reduce the sins" will get you out -- I've fixed some but not (yet) all of the issues mentioned, and I've seen very little improvement. Others seem to report a similar experience, leading to the conclusion that merely reducing the "sins" will not be enough, but rather you will have to completely eliminate all of these problems before you'll see much in the way of improvement.

Right now I'm working on rewriting my text content. It seems to be the only consistent factor in the recovery stories I've seen -- either they've changed nothing and recovered due to algo tweaks, or they rewrote or removed substantial amounts of content.