I have lost my 2 main money making sites in Bourbon and I would like them back! I see that some people are getting their SERPs back. I on the other hand feel like a duck swimming in a freezing pool - the ice is creeping ever closer. My SERPs are still in decline still. It feels like a penalty. I have PR drop on some pages but whether they had dropped before Bourbon or not I don't know (I don't check every individual page) I have increased links and the main SERP is still in the top 10 but 90% of the smaller SERPs drop every day. Sometimes one will bounce back but can then go again. What do we know? Lots of talk of scraped content (my very small links directory pull in title and meta descriptions on both affected sites - Have changed one site as I feel KW count was too high - just URL now - I suppose that could have been the problem on 1 site). Lots of talk on duplicate content - have found sites duplicating mine and rectified it (got them to change theirs in some cases, and had to change mine when they refused in one case - don't have enough fight in me at the moment to persue it). 302 hijacks - didn't have any but found some horrible looking links that don't go anywhere. Error on google's part - perhaps they misplaced some data or something. On the up side I have had a couple of newer domains look like they are coming out of the sandbox - but these are not commercial sites - they will not feed the kids or pay the mortgage. As a last resort I will 301 one of the affected domains to one of the newer ones and see what that does. I would like to know what has worked for all you that have reagained their positions and what the people that are in my position are trying / have tried. Good luck to everyone affected by Bourbon - I think we all know the waves of panic created by it!
Bourbon has not been my friend. I understand the feeling of being penalized. That's what mine seems like as well, especially looking at the serps on the other SE's. My last resort is to make some sort of update on every page and reflect the new update dates in the google sitemap xml so that maybe G will give them back some love.
My listings are back as of today. I didn't do a lot of changes. I waited. Only things I did were: 1-Get rid of the 2nd keyword instance in the title tag: From: Keyword: Shop for Keyword at my site To: Keyword at My site (I think the first one looks better, but who knows) 2-Checked for duplicate content thru copyscape. If content was duplicated, I had it rewritten. 2 weeks and ~$1,000 later, its done LOL.
I had one site that was really affected by Bourbon, today it had about 40 KWs bounce from nowhere back to page 2 to 4 and in some cases page 1. However, many of these were top 5 rankings before. I have read that GG stated that Bourbon was over about a week ago. If that is the case, then maybe they used it to clean up the index and have now started to put our sites back into place? <sigh>. BTW, I have not changed anything since many of my listings fell off the map.