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hey guys, Any updates on the ahreflang tests? I'm in a similar boat - one site got a manual hit in Feb2014...sitewide penalty, at one point brand name was even deindexed. Got penalty lifted in 5 months. But traffic has not recovered one bit since then.

These are my outreach tools, though some might not call them that name, but they keep my work in daily contact with thousands of  people who are interested in my industry. ** A news page on my website where I post links to industry news stories on other websites and any new content that is posted on my own site.  This page is visited by about a thousand people per day. ** An RSS feed of the links to news stories described above that goes out via Feedburner to a few thousand people. ** A Feedburner email list of several thousand subscribers who want to receive the list of story links described above. I am not an outreach kind of person.  I don't want to schmooze people.  Instead I just do my best to post what people want, and allow them to opt in for a daily RSS, or email, or visit to my news page.  You will not get this overnight.  But if you are dedicated to featuring everyone in your industry who is doing something good, lots of people will want to hear this stuff.  Then, when you publish something new.... BAM... it goes out to your whole tribe and they share it with other people for you. Once people see you doing this, a few of them will send you great stuff to feature.  That will make your job easier. So, instead of schmoozing people and sending your stuff out to Mailchimp and all of these other services, build something good on your own site and let other people promote your stuff for you.

Thanks Federico for the detailed response and quick feedback!  I was not 100% sure how subdomains were treated, so thank you for clearing that up. I definitely needed to pick some expert brains on this one. Looks like we will go with a separate WP install under a /learning/ directory just to provide our root domain with better authority from all this good content:)