I decided to do a little more digging… so I checked some of my more “niche” keyword phrases… and on most of them I have moved up slightly. What’s strange, though, is that they don’t have any real special optimization… in fact, I would almost consider the optimization to be slightly worse with the new site rather than the old one.
So one of two things must’ve happened – it liked the new site better, or else I didn’t notice something that it didn’t like.
And, I tried my keyword phrases in Chinese as well – and lo and behold, I have moved up quite a bit – but truthfully I do not know where I ranked pre-Florida, post-Florida, pre-Brandy for the Chinese keywords so I can’t say for sure whether it is better or not. It does, however, lead me to believe that we are not back to pre-Florida but that part of the Florida filter was modified.
I do know that for the competitive keywords in English I took a big hit… so something must be wrong there, especially judging by the lack of quality in many sites above me.