Status of Sites Penalised after Florida

How many of you have recovered?

[webnewton]

It's more than 7 months now since the Florida update but it feels like yesterday. And why not, i am among the one's who suffered major setback. Of my group of 200+ sites some 30 sites were lost. Some were gone during florida other during Austin.
I had lost hope that these sites will ever come back even after all the efforts. But it seems something positive is happening. During last update(Some 2 weeks back)these penalised site(which have lost their PR and rankings) seems to be coming back.
1)All these site still have a PR zero.The sites are however back in index and Google has update the backword links for these sites.
2)One strage thing is that despite showing the backword links Google is not reflecting the Cache of the pages.
3)Another intresting thing with some site is that while inner pages have been indexed the home page is not in index.

My Interpretation: I feel the sites are back again. The cache is missing. This may be because the sites are now being treated as new sites and since the google has found extensive backword links for the site it must have sandboxed the site.

Well, i am keeping my fingers crossed. Has anyone else seem simmilar thing or been able to recover from Florida setback?

[Magnum_PI]

We have not recovered yet. Anticipate our recovery will be around late September.

[Marcia]

With one site I kind of figured out what happened, what was being done and how to fix it, but held off to try to be more certain of my "theories." Sure enough, everyone else who had been ranking well for that search (a local one) came back and I didn't. At some point in time further down the line I made the necessary modifications and came back stronger than ever before.

Another site got hit, much for some of the same things - I've never made the modifications, it's still so far lost in outer space even NASA couldn't find it if they tried.

[Powdork]

Came back a long time ago, around mid december to respectable positons and then January to same as before Florida.
Heres what i did. Some, all, or none may be pertinent
1. Added relevant links to competitors from my homepage, and anywhere else they might help the user.
2. Grew the site by a factor of 10 with relevant unique content. I have since split this content into a different site with no ill affects.
3. Added Adsense to all pages.
4. Created a new homepage which could be described as being one level up taxonomically wise from the old homepage. This was also split off to the new site.

i, however, was never dropped from the index, only pushed down 4 or 5 hundred spots.

[BryantStevens]

I came back with no modifications to my pages at all.

All of a sudden I was gone for about two months, maybe three. Then I was back. Maybe got a few more backlinks to my page but that was about it. It was not a large amount. Perhaps like 5 or so.

I DID experiment with one test page. But nothing I did seemed to matter or influence the serps. The only thing I did was rewrite some copy for the page though.

[Essex_boy]

Mine only in parts.

I had 50 pages all wel ranked I have only one in number 1 and only one other page on Google.

Tell you the truth ive given up on Google, the Alog is just to dam shaky and unstable, ive switched to Yahoo which Im happy to report list me well on all of my keywords.

Plus also I can sleep at nights not having to worry about losing my site etc.

[webnewton]

Well guys in my case, these 30 sites were interlinked, were on the same topic. Indeed 6 of these site were in top 10 for a hyper competitive keyword. They're all gone after florida.But then they came back in mid january for a period of one month.And still not back.
Here are few other points
1)Google is moving very slow on bringing out the changes whether it's updation of new sites
(this is agin being hampered by sandboxing) or the removal of penalisation of sites.
2)Two of my sites have even gained a pr of 2 but still no cache for them. No cache means not in SERPS.

Looking at the pace the goolge is going i feel that by mid August all the penalised site should be back in SERPS.

Note: There is this intresting thing. Even though yahoo and google have parted thier ways i saw this strage phenominan. Sites penalised by google have also got the same treatment with Yahoo. Has it happened with anyone else too.

[Powdork]

Yes, there are a number of circumstances like that. The latest is the onmouseover redirect penalty, which appears to knock sites out of both indexes.

[Marcia]

The one I've got that's never come back is still #1 at Yahoo for the main keyword phrase and 1-3 for two other of the most important phrases - on interior pages - actually the most important on the site. Then there are a lot of little ones, also lost at Google but never a problem with Yahoo/MSN.

The reason I left the site alone is that someone was constantly "swiping" from it. I was being watched like a hawk and it was a horrible feeling. In fact, I caught all the pages being downloaded in FP. The keywords I used, some of the copy and phrases I used, analyzing the "optimization" and trying to emulate it. So I left it as is for them to copy away, which they did in addition to a couple of other things on their site that weren't too smart. So now, in spite of a lot of relevant inbound links and excellent PR, they've got big problems and have lost all the rankings they had, big time.

[pavel]

I am not back yet. I was in top 10 for 6-7 hyper competitive keyword. Now I am back for one very competitive keyword. I was listed great on German translation of my main keywords. Althou these keyword are less competitive I am not in the top 100 for any of this keywords. I thing I am still filtered for any reason. I am trying lots of things, but Google is so slow in their changes that it is hard to find out the reason why.

Doing very vell on Yahoo. My visits are 50% lower then before florida and most of the trafic is comming from Yahoo.

[Heywood_J]

I fully came back in January and I hope I stay where I am (I am knocking on wood as I write this). The Florida Update realy kicked my butt last November, as it did to thousands of other websites. Thank god my business was not directly tied to the holiday shopping season, as I know many others were. I check google everyday day and I hold my breath that my rankings are still there. I am so nervous that a similar update to Florida can strike at anytime. But, to answer your question, my site has fully recovered from florida.

[bhd735]

We have a site that before the florida update was consistently (several years) top ten in google for our 2-word search term. After florida and still to this day, we are somewhere beyond 500 rank. We still have a page rank of 5 and do not do anything spammy. We still come in 1 and 3 for msn and yahoo for the same terms.

In google we still come in #1 for our 3-word search terms. Just nothing for our 2-word search terms. We regularly publish news on our site and google no longer returns those pages for 2-word terms (or atleast not before 400-500). Pages that reference our pages are returned in the top 20.

Has google instituted some kind of blocking system for 1 and 2-word search terms for commercial sites to "encourage" people to use their ads? We broke down several months ago to use their ads, since we cannot get back at all for our original 2-word terms.

[elgrande]

My main site (the only one I made any changes to) recently came back. I wanted to figure out how to get one back before I monkeyed with the others.

I did this just by getting inbound links from competitors who were still ranking well (I guess so-called authorities). I had to pay dearly for some of these links, but it worked.

Example. To rank well for CITY WIDGETS, I first got inbound links from WIDGETS authorities because it was easier (they weren't direct competitors). Very quickly my site reappeared (but ranked low) for this term. When I got a few links from other sites which ranked well for CITY WIDGETS, my site shot up to page 1. And when I managed to get (i.e., buy) links from the (previously) #1 and #2 sites, my site finally made it to #1 (two days ago).

This had the effect of also causing my site to reappear for the term CITY (started on page 10, now on page 2). It is next to impossible for me to get links from my competitors for this word, so my progress has slowed.

I am quite confident that if I now get links from well-ranking WODGETS sites, and then follow that up with a link from a top-ranking CITY WODGETS site, my site will rocket up for the CITY WODGETS phrase. I plan to do this for all my important keywords. I believe that this will eventually bump me up for the term CITY as well, but that progress for the single word will be less rapid.

Hilltop?

Background: Back around Florida/Brandy, my site was completely dropped from Google for all the important keywords that I was optimized for. It was only linked from one other site of mine (a single link), had no duplicate content, and did not link out to any of my sites. It had the standard "Title, H1, anchor text" structure, all unqiue content, nothing fishy that I was aware of, but only around 30 or so medium-quality inbound links (relevant, but usually about COUNTRY). It kept a top-5 ranking in Yahoo for 95% of its keywords (and still does). Gone in Google for ~5 months, but now basically back to where I was before I wasted the better part of 5 months trying to figure it out. Well, I drank a lot, and that was sort of fun. I still have a bitter taste in my mouth for Google (or is that from the tequila?). None of my other sites which I have not touched have reappeared.

[webnewton]

For those of you who think they've succeded in getting thier site back in SERPS, what do you think worked for you. What did you do to get the penalty reversed.