Pages Dropped From Top5 to nowhere in top500 after 1 day of 404 errors

[checkout]

My hosting company mistakenly restored an old backup causing 404 errors for a section of my site. This caused 404 errors for approximately 24 hours.

Within 4 days, Google has removed the pages from their normal index. They were previously ranking in the top 5 positions for target keywords and MANY related keywords.

What can I do to solve this?

[potentialgeek]

Sue your hosting company.

[tedster]

If the error is fixed, you should see rankings return quickly without doing anything further. I've seen it happen many times.

[checkout]

@potentialgeek: I don't really want to pursue that. thanks though.

@tedster: I also found that a large number of pages on my site were still cached with the old urls... this could play a factor. I've cleared the cache and now ALL urls on the site are current so as not to confuse Google.

I also increased my crawl rate since it's 3k pages that need updating.

INTERESTING NOTE: My sitelinks were last updated June 22nd according to Webmaster Tools... But they are using the old, outdated URLs which have been 301ed for over a month.

Interesting. Looks like I really confused google.

[tedster]

a large number of pages on my site were still cached with the old urls

Are you talking about your server or the Google "cached" page. Don't worry about the Google "cached" page, it is not in sync with ranking.

[checkout]

Hi Tedster, I meant 3k+ pages of my site were cached by my caching script on the server. So, even though I had updated the links, the cache wasn't updated. It's a very simple one which doesn't have a TTL so if i make any changes, I have to delete all of it.

Here's an update on what I did June 28th:

1. I fixed all the links on my site, which were pointing to the old URLs.
2. I increased the crawl rate from .2 req/sec to 1.5req/sec temporarily to speed up reindexing (hopefully)

There is still no sign of return. My pages are not in the top 500. :( I'm outranked by hundreds of sites with no authority, scraped content, and just a few backlinks from spammy blog-link networks.

I'm thinking of just creating new pages and 301ing again after I saw this: [hobo-web.co.uk...]

[checkout]

Pages STILL haven't recovered.