One strong analysis point she made early on was that her backlink profile is full of scrapers and legitimate re-publishers, many of whom were definitely tagged by Panda as being shallow. So she feels that rather having a strong, direct effect, Panda may have devalued half of their backlinks that were previously supporting the forum's rankings.

Not satisfied with just that, she also made several very savvy changes:

1. Added noindex meta tag to all threads with zero replies (orphans)
2. Stopped the indexing of site search result pages via robots.txt
3. Removed the tag clouds from Google indexing via robots.txt
4. Changed the URL structure (a project that she was avoiding)

Thanks for sharing this Ted.
So far these 4 points just doesn't add up for our verticals that we track. Because top guys are breaking all the rules hehehe :)

According to Quantcast they (Daniweb) have not recovered. In fact they appear to be on their way back down after a recent small upward trend.

Ok, Danny, you are trying to poke the skies in search of the God but... It was 19 minutes wasted, i will not recommend this video as it has nothing valuable for Webmasterworld users...
Oh my god, helpless Webpronews writer (his report title is "DaniWeb Speaks out on Recovering from Google Panda")... I wish they had Mr Panda himself to actually answer the questions and help little girl Danny, she was so afraid to mention that G search results have gotten worse, poor thing.

She could have jumped the gun here a bit. I was hit by Panda 1.0 and weeks after, saw a very noticeable 15% to 20% increase in search traffic. Of course, Panda 2.0 hit and all that evaporated overnight. Weeks following, it's been up/down/up/down. So in reality, I would consider any adjustments up as "noise" unless it's significant and sustained. After studying my traffic trends, I can see that the constitution of traffic has changed. I had focused earlier on fixing my site's design/layout features and am now just looking at content. I see where I may have gone amiss on content too -- my biggest traffic pages where off topic and brand pages. So not surprised what happened here.

According to the graph she, herself, posted, she hasn't recovered. I really think she wants to believe it, Panda has done a number on her and bills must be piling up.

@Tedster "her backlink profile is full of scrapers and legitimate re-publishers, many of whom were definitely tagged by Panda as being shallow. Panda may have devalued half of their backlinks that were previously supporting the forum's rankings."
If this is the case, it would only mean that Google has no clue about what's happening, discounting the important factor - the votes from "legitimate re-publishers"

Thanks for sharing. Any recovery report is useful.

Dani Web also has posted on Google Webmaster forum and has received feedback. I remember each time i was clicked on a page of her forum, a pop-up was blocking the page, really bad experience. Now pop-up isn't anymore.

So, she's made all these changes yet is still in the same position, 50% down...that's what she said.

How can anyone try and put an improvement gloss on this when there has clearly not been one?

50% down globally. But according to Quantcast, they are at least 75% down in US. I really don't see any recovery here...

How can anyone try and put an improvement gloss on this

= to make sure it gets watched ...

What is more depressing, on assumption that people are cleverer than me and watch their sites more carefully, is the fact that she reasoned out what might be wrong and spent hours , and $'s, doing changes and for no real improvement.

She is also watching her core community's satisfaction closely - and reports that it has remained healthy. That's a very savvy focus.

That's another thing Tedster, not even her huge community helped her gain rankings (or keep them).

She is not back at all, go to quantcast and see. Her stats are certified too, Quantcast measures them directly so they are as accurate as they can be.

not even her huge community helped her

This is the problem - currently 90% of our traffic is direct to site, and even pre-Panda it was 50%+

As Google has no way of measuring that traffic , except through Chrome and any associated tools, how do they know what site is popular if its buried in the serps ?

I actually wonder how long Google will take for someone to say- opps - better reverse this ( disguised as a Panda 3 for PR purposes )

= to make sure it gets watched ...

By the GG...Google Gods...hahaha...oh brownie points for you Dani making us look good when you've done nothing? :-)

I reckon there's a very big bucket of phd filled kaka right now since they obviously have NO clue what to do!

Well, since she mentioned she was working on back links ... good publicity move on the video and interview. Perhaps she'll experience some traffic and backlinks from that.

One thing to note, that she mentioned she has noindex,followed lot of pages. The reason one may not see a return of prePanda traffic could be due to this fact that many of these pages are no longer in the index and the volume of traffic that her site brought in is no longer the same as before. So keep that in mind.