How long to recover from our screw up?

Robots file messed up- haven't been crawled since 26 Jan

[brizad]

Hi All,
I have been lurking and learning for about a year. I actually posted once about 6 months ago but was deleted for lack of activity...thanks for all of your knowledge and tips.

The problem is that one of our programmers messed up the robots file and we have not been crawled since 26 Jan. The bot has been visiting but we were serving it a 500 error message and it did not crawl us of course.
We have gone from 5-6k hits a day normally to about 500 today..ouch! Needless to say business is off about 80%.
We have fixed the problem but are completely out of Google. Is there anything that we can do or do we just have to wait until next month until we are reindexed? Do you think that we will be normal again next month or will it take longer? Will we regain our former PR or will we have to rebuild. Will freshbot have any effect in reindexing us quickly or do we just have to wait for deepbot?
Any tips or thoughts?
Thanks!

PS. A tip from me learned the hard way....Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. If you drop that basket man are you hurtin! :-(

[Susanne]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld! :)
Yup, you just gotta wait. If you're lucky you'll be in during the next update but don't be surprised if you have to wait at least two months. It's impossible to say whether you'll have the same PR again because Google's algo changes every month and the sites linking to you might change too. Do you still have incoming links from sites that are currently indexed in Google? In that case all you need is time and patience. Good luck!

[webdevsf]

I did the same thing. Still waiting to get back...

You might be able to "prod" googlebot into coming back with a few high PR backlinks (even if it's just temporary)

But, be careful of course, about link farms, and all that.

[jdMorgan]

After any update to your robots.txt, use the robots.txt checker at WebmasterWorld's sister site: [searchengineworld.com...]

You might try visitng your own site with the Google Toolbar enabled - some say it helps.

HTH,
Jim

[DaveN]

try and get some links from sites that the freshbot visits.

DaveN

PS buy large bottle of whiskey when update starts, start drinking until you don't care whether you are in or not this will help reduce the stress and save your health.

[brizad]

Thanks everybody! You gave me the answer that I was afraid you would give....just wait.

from DaveN: PS buy large bottle of whiskey when update starts, start drinking until you don't care whether you are in or not this will help reduce the stress and save your health.

I haven't made it to the whiskey yet...stickin with gin so far! :)

[brizad]

The good news is, freshbot visited us many times today so at least they haven't forgotten about us! I have not seen deepbot but haven't checked the logs for a few hours.
It is nice to see g-bot keeps walkin' the web. I just hope we get back in the index quickly!