I have been working on a new site and just wanted to give back to the community that has helped me so much. My 1.5 month old site was doing great in the SERPs. It was ranked high for almost every key word that I tried to rank for. We build content up in a slow but sure manner over the course on that 1.5 months. I then decided to start my link building as it was time to officially launch. My partner and I added our link to the signature in many forums that we have posted on over the past 5 years. I think this probably added over 10,000 links at one time, 80% of them related to the site and probably considered high quality links. After reading DP google obv saw this as way to many and unnatural and sent us down the SERPs by 50-60 spots on average on May 7th. This was the last time google bot has been to my site. Today around 5pm I am back on top of all my keywords and the traffic is starting to flow once again even without google bot coming back. During the last 12 days I have added some content and made a few posts that would of boosted my link count but only on a very small basis. All content is very unique as well. Cliff notes: Googles -50 Penalty for excessive links in one update only lasted 12 days on my PR0 1.5 month old site.
Hey thats good to know that your site is out of google penalty, how ever the test sample too little to conclude that it lasts only for 12 days.
I agree with you - time will tell what is going on. In addition, I think the site is not in a very competitive niche, that's why it is (probably) out of penalty so soon. Try something like that with "web hosting" "credit card" or "home loan" website - the penalty will be around a year.