How to find out what I need to do to recover from Google update?

[benners]

A site of mine (http://bit.ly/qJ35Pq) crashed out 29 Sept 2012. It's a useful site for users, has user generated reviews, regular topical blog posts of good quality and has ranked well for years.

To try and recover rankings I've done the following:

• clean out over optimisation
• improve content for user
• fix some internal link issues
• Backlink clean with a scalpel
• Disavow request
• Found I'd missed some bad backlinks
• Backlink clean again with a machete
• Disavow request

I think I'm still missing something that Google has issue with.

Can anyone see anything I've missed or any tools that might help be discover other issues to resolve.

Thanks for your help.

Paul

[FedeEinhorn]

Apparently you did all the necessary steps.

Did you receive a manual penalty? or was it an algorithmic? (message / no message).

Under your WMT, can you see the penalty? (under manual actions), what does it say?

Did you fill a reconsideration request?

Unfortunately, there's been reports that even after doing everything by the rule and even have the penalty revoked, you may never get your old rankings back, kind of leaves it with a stigma. I happened to me, algorithmic penalty, it shows up in WMT, did everything by the rule, cleaned up everything and we are still ranking very low and working mainly with our historical customers (can't get new ones without search traffic).

[benners]

Thanks for your reply.

I don't have any message and I've twice submitted a reconsideration request and both times told I had no manual spam actions.

Maybe I've done all I can.