Hit by Panda before recovering from Penguin

[AshUK83]

I was hit by Penguin in Oct 13 (negative seo attack). I lost 85% of my Google organic traffic.

I disavowed and appear to have recovered from Penguin on the 3.0 update. However my traffic only increased by about 30%. So I am still only at about 40% of my original pre Oct 13 traffic.

There must have been a recovery of Penguin to see the sudden 30% jump. During the penalty I was on pages 5, 6, 7 but now I'm on my page 2. Instead of being in positions 1-3 for my keywords, like I was over a year ago, I'm at positions 24-28.

Firstly, is Penguin an "on / off" penalty, or are there different levels of the penalty?

Secondly, I could have been affected by Panda whilst under the Penguin penalty, but how do I know? I wouldn't see any traffic differences because traffic has always been incredibly low during the penalty.

Some of you might say the links I disavowed were helping me before the penalty, so I can't expect to rank well having disavowed them. Well I don't believe this because all the neg seo links were so unbelievably poor, they could never help. Secondly, there are now sites ranking above me that have a much worse backlink profile than mine. It's not a high competitive niche that I am in.

[aristotle]

Do you get most of your traffic from just a few keywords or is it spread over a large number of keywords and long-tail searches? Also, does most of the traffic arrive on just one or two pages or do a lot of the site's pages attract traffic independently?

[AshUK83]

It's an ecommerce site selling a niche product, and nothing else. So it gets traffic from about 4 different variations of describing the product, and then traffic from some long tail key word variants of that. It may sound like limited traffic but I used to do quite well and made a very good living. Now it just scrapes by with income through traffic mainly from adwords.

I was not expecting to make a Penguin recovery and only gain about 30% traffic.

I see other websites have copied content from my website so I could be affected by Panda, but how am I supposed to know if I've been penalized by Penguin for over 12 months?

Do I report these scraped content sites to Google? Or is it easier to replace the content with unique / new un-scraped content?

[aristotle]

i don't see how anyone can give you a definitive answer. The algorithm has changed, the competition has changed, other types of penalties besides Penguin and Panda could be in play. Some say that the current update isn't over. Situations like yours are discussed here all the time and usually there's no definite answer. There's another big thread about the current Penguin update which you might want to study.

[Planet13]

Do I report these scraped content sites to Google?

Yes, file a DMCA with google