2. For some reasons, one of my websites has received a set of penalties on Google’s July update. Instead of  submitting a re inclusion request (I wasn’t really with anything on the dark side), I completely changed the URL structure to something that I see now more appropriate. I rebuilt the XML sitemap and resubmitted it. While I wasn’t expecting any second day miracles, I wanted that the associated Custom Search Engine to show the correct results. Event though they say that they process in a max of 24h any new sitemaps, now after 30h I’m still seeing the old results

UPDATE: Just immediately after this post, crawling was resumed and the blog started ranking for same high traffic keywords. In short, if you have an old site/blog that doesn’t receive traffic due to lack of updates, don’t worry. Google will be right back at you once you start adding content