Just wanted some feedback on my situation. I have a keyword which ranked #3 in the SERPS for a decent amount of time. The other day, I created a new page in the same category, and when I assigned the sub category, I did it incorrectly. This lead it to grab the default sub category, which is the same page the #3 result lands on. This created another page with the exact same content but a different URL. Google has a cache date of the 16th, the new page was crewated on the 13th and I know there is a day or two gap between the spider visit and the cache page. The pages only have like 75 words of total text, but both pages body text(for that instance) were the same. The titles of each document were the same. Needless to say, the #3 result has been gone since the night of the 13th and no where to be found. Could this be a result of the duplicate content or would that be insignificant enough for Google to wipe off as a mistake?
Hmmm, I don't think this is a duplicate content issue; with duplicate content one web page would be displayed and the other would be burried. Give it 24-48 hours and see if things return to normal. Did you lose any major backlinks to your site?