Domain name bid dilemma

So, I've been having a problem bumping the #1 guy for my targeted keyword because he's been sandboxed in so well. I know he hasn't done anything with the site in the last year and figured, eventually I'll bump him. The only problem is how young my site is (5 months old). As I've continued my link building and other SEO strategies, I've landed the #2 spot.

Last month, the guy idiotically let his domain name expire with GoDaddy. Mind you, he still had that 30 day period to redeem it while it sat on GoDaddy's servers, without his data. I thought "hey, let's by this bitch out!"

That's when the dilemma began. I've never bid on a domain and the correspondence between GoDaddy's bidders and the domain owner has been ridiculous. Now we're finally near an agreeable bidding amount but in the last couple days he's completely fell off Google, even though he renewed the domain and his site data is back up. He still holds strong on Bing and Yahoo, but that's worth little to me compared to Google.

My question is, if I acquire the domain through the bid and I start to really push the site and its SEO, will I be able to reclaim the #1 spot fairly quickly, or am I basically starting over? There's really only 3 other people who are making any SEO effort with their sites for this particular keyword, so my greatest competition is myself with my #2 site, but it would be amazing for business to hold both the #1 and #2 spot.

Congrats!


Congrats, now you're #1!!!

What seems to be the problem?

(I personally think it would be kind of tacky to hold both the #1 and #2 slots. We'll see what the other guys think. )

Actually, I'm the #2 spot now, after he's fallen off. There's another competitor site above me. So, I guess it would be like having the #1 spot (if the site I buy goes back to #1) and the #3 spot.

My question is, will it be fairly easy to get it back to the #1 spot since the site is now back online and all the links to it still exist? It's been back up for about a week now but is still off the SERPs for that search term on Google. It's held the #1 spot (until now) ever since I've followed the search term for the last 5-6 months.