aristotle - 1:15 am on Dec 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

It's so frustrating that while we are close to recovering...we're just about 10 spots below where we were before. I don't know what the extra oomph we need is to get us over the hump.

If you removed and/or disavowed a lot of backlinks, then your site has probably lost a good part of its incoming "pagerank juice". So in order to return to your pre-Penguin Google rankings and traffic levels, most likely you need to get enough new backlinks to regain the pagerank juice that you've lost.