robzilla - 12:23 am on Sep 10, 2011 (gmt 0)

odd - I thought it was about life after Google

Me too, until I started reading. It's mostly about giving Google a good bashing, either directly or indirectly by praising Bing into the high heavens. Don't forget that as soon as Bing starts gaining some decent ground on Google, you should expect to see those spectacular conversion rates go down and become similar to Google's. And do you honestly believe that Bing would give you a head's up, if they were to penalize your site? They're no different, really, so this is a pointless exercise. I empathize with the fact that you've lost a good source of income, I really do, but you're not grabbing the bull by the proverbial horns. "Life after Google" suggests to me that you've given up. What's the point of giving up, if you truly believe you've been wrongfully accused?

So I'm "trigger happy" because I smell guilt: nowhere do I see you really questioning this penalty. Look beyond things like duplicate content and the like. You weren't penalized because a Google employee accidentally bumped his elbow into a big red button after failing to do a wheelie on his office chair. There's likely something about your site that smells not just fishy, but downright rotten, to Google's algorithm, and it's your job to find out what it is. As tedster noted in another thread [webmasterworld.com] about the "manual checks" you think you've seen over the years, "there are many factors that might trigger a quick manual check and they don't all mean that some manual penalty is going to follow". Besides, if you think you've seen severals "checks" of your site, why didn't you sound the alarm?

My advice for anyone with a penality, forget trying to fix it and begin to work with Bing.

Unless you're in my niche, I advise you to do quite the opposite. Get to work -- if your site's worth it.

...with Googlebot gone, I have TONS more bandwidth and CPU for the actual users

Why didn't you set a custom crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools, if Googlebot was hurting your site's performance this much?