Crushing blow from Google... Why?

[DavidO]

About 2 weeks ago I made an awful blunder. I uploaded a new sales page with "noindex, nofollow" tags. Naturally, the page was de-indexed.

A week ago I discovered the problem and corrected it. To speed up recovery I've created several new pages of content, ran a massive backlinking campaign and submitted a new sitemap.

About 3 days ago my index page reappeared but way, way back in the search positions. I've lost every one of my Page 1 SERPs that I've worked 5 years to achieve. Naturally, traffic and sales have taken a nosedive.

Everyone tells me to be patient, that the page will recover its former positions in a few days. Well, it's been 3 days now and, if anything, the page has slipped further.

What's more, it's gone from PR3 to PR2. I don't care about page ranking but this tells me there's some kind of penalty going on.

WHY???

I have NEVER spammed or used any kind of blackhat techniques. The new sales page is clean as a whistle. I've changed my pages dozens of times without it ever affecting my rankings.

The only big change in my new page is that I shortened it by replacing some of the content with a video. But there's still tons of keyword-rich content (my content section is 2,500 words).

And I thought Google was favoring videos!

I can't understand such a severe penalty (if it really is a penalty) for the mistake I made. According to others who have made the same blunder, their pages quickly returned to normal.

I don't even know how to find out if there is a problem with my page. I'm still hoping it will recover as others keep saying but there's been no movement at all.

I've tried the Google webmaster forum but nobody has replied.

With about 75% of my business coming through searches this is killing me.

Got any suggestions?

[yukon]

It's not a penalty, Google hasn't recovered since you last told them to stay away from your page (noindex).

Google has thousands of servers all over the USA & the rest of the world, looks like all the servers havn't been updated.

Keep building fresh content/pages with RSS feeds updated, forget new backlinks for now, that only causes a page to bounce & adds to the problem.

Focus on fresh pages every single day, at least a new page per day.

Also, make sure to have an internal link with keyword anchor-text in your entire sites footer. Each new page that gets found will include this footer link & keep pointing Google to the lost page.

[DavidO]

Thanks, Yukon. That at least shows some optimism. So what you're saying is that the page has been re-indexed but not re-evaluated?

The page has totally recovered its postions in bing and yahoo, so there's surely nothing wrong with it.

By the way, I know I'm responsible for the problem but it seemed as if the circumstances showed some kind of penalty. I'm happy to accept your opinion on this and just hope it doesn't take too much longer.

[markowe]

Three days is a very short time, hang on in there.

[alcymart]

This happened to me last year, and it took 1 full month before I gained the position I was back in SERP's!

Googlebot takes a noindex or nofollow very seriously.

Bernard

[yukon]

OP, is the URL the exact same now as it was when the page ranked good in the SERPs?

[SEO Training Alliance]

I've had this happen to landing pages where I've changed the content, takes you back but you have almost definitely not be penalised.

Your rankings will come back, it just takes some time to re-assess.

Don't worry too much about it, its a good time to start hitting up some other traffic sources while you're waiting for your SEO to kick back in

Gavin