SevenCubed - 8:14 pm on Oct 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

My main point is this. No matter how low you are currently ranking, it is not a cause for hopelessness - especially if you used to rank well. The fact that your URL is still in the result set anywhere at all is a positive sign in a very negative situation.

I have to agree with that. I've said before that for my own personal site I don't want it ranking high because I wouldn't be able to handle the added attention. Seriously it's been over a year since I checked for my site in results for the over-optimized term. So for the sake of this thread I caved in and went and had a look. For a primary highly competitive term that the majority of the 500+ competitors of mine want to rank for I'm in position -450.

Yet, if google considered my site to be poison over-all then they probably wouldn't rank me on page #1 results for 3 secondary terms that as highly competitive as the one for which I'm pushed down. Those 3 terms are not over-optimized.

I have to agree with tedster on this one. Don't look at it as being a hopeless case. I'm sure it can be recovered. In my case I simply don't want to recover it or have it on page one for the suppressed search term.