What happened Aug 2011 - when rankings returned after years?

[Donna]

So what really changed Aug 2011.

I have noticed a numerous reports of people getting their sites back after more than 1-2+ years of total absence from the serps. My site mysteriously disappeared end beginning of Jul 2009 and suddenly appeared Aug between 15th-25th. And is ranking as it was 2 yrs ago. Here is a post to it [webmasterworld.com ] from 2 yrs ago. The site was not banned or de-indexed just lost all rankings for its main page. Nothing was changed in the mean time nor back links added as I was advised just to wait and see .

Please if you had any similar experiences share them so we can pin point what exactly is going on as it is obviously not a one person case.





P.S. I had to add : no black or grey hat has been done, and results return 600 mil - 1 billion for main keywords blue widget, green widget, white widget etc.

[indyank]

Was it a backlink penalty then and the site has now been released from it?

[indyank]

You are right and i have already read three reports here that sites which disappeared 2 years ago have come back. All of you mention the same time frame and that is one thing common for your sites.

[Donna]

Backlinking was not aggressive as some suggested at that time, was about 1k links but approximately 100 domains. Worst case scenario would be link devaluation I guess and not 2 yrs out of KWs. But we know how mysterious google can be. Thats the point of this topic . And yes I am aiming at creating and authority brand name site as most of the anchor links were as the name.

[Zivush]

This is exactly what the Panda update created -
Old website are waking up: sites rises from hell to claim their victim's soul...
It is an odd phenomena that Google must deal now before more people notice their completely wrong approach.

[rowtc2]

Probably it was a penalty and now is expired.