Google penalty after removing subpages

[mola4ever]

I have been working on a site a couple of months back and wanted to share with you some info i was able to gather.

The webmaster after changing servers and some other inconveniences talked with i don't know what guy (as i was starting working with the site) and facelifted the site. What he did actually was: remove ½ (half) the pages and designed new ones although certain pages were still ranking on search engines for the desired keywords.

I noticed a -950 on all subpages for that domain but only on Google and Yahoo. MSN was either too lazy to respond or god knows but keywords were still ranking fine.

Rankings went back up after i disallowed every damn page, so i guess it ain't really wise to rank up with 404 pages right ?

[tedster]

How much time between the ranking drop and the reappearance? I'm thinking that this may have been a period of "trust checking" because of so many changes at once - and the robots.txt might not have been the cause of re-appearing. It might just be a coincidence in timing.

[mola4ever]

I think you could be right... but IMO it's strange to get the 2x rankings drop(Google&Yahoo) while MSN just sits back and watches... I really have my doubts about live.com... they're too freaky.
I have sites that do extremely well in MSN (vs Google) while other sites rank well in Google+Yahoo but arent't even Indexed in MSN...
Cuil anyone ?:))))