I would just like to say upfront that I'm new to all this seo stuff just so you all know So this is what happend... I was trying to get my site onto the first page for a specific keyword and managed to get up to page 7 all the way from page 40+ which I was happy about. I then had to password protect my entire site as I was re-doing the whole theme. Two days later, I undo the password protection and have my site fully operational again. Problem is, I am now ranked on pages between 60-70! Have I just lost all my seo work? Will I return back to near where I was once google re-crawls my site? I really hope I don't have to start from scratch, It's taken me months of work to get on page 7... Thanks in advance for any info
I really doubt that all your SEO efforts have just disappeared. I'm sure you'll get ranked quite high again once Google crawls your website.
You might have done some damage - one of the factors Google looks at is reliability and stability. Try to avoid taking your site down for maintenance in future - instead maybe set up a dev site at dev.yoursite.com or something so that you can test new stuff there before pushing it to live. However as GeekHang says - it's likely you'll see your positions bounce back soon, just maybe not quite to to the heights they were before. Do some emergency link building now to get some inbound links and get some more trust.
You will most likely receive your search rank again. Depends on your PageRank, most likely Google won't crawl every single page on your site in 2 days. To be safe, duplicate your site into a sub-domain and work from there. When ready, switch everything to your domain That way you can prevent similar situation happens again.
Your ranking will come back, google could have tried to crawl your site while you had it password protected thus thinking all the content was gone (hidden to the normal viewer) thus decreasing your rank. Give it time, your ranking will start to move back up and continue with your ongoing seo efforts to help push your site further up the serps. Just remember to do what others have suggested, create a sub folder or directory for testing purposes so you do not disrupt the main site again.
ping your page (ie pingomatic etc) get those G spiders to come and crawl and everything should be fine
I hope your site is not new as It might been undergoing Google Dance. Anyway you may just build more links and I'm sure it will rank higher again in SERPs.
Thanks for all the help so far guys, appreciated. @BrianJump Does pingomatic only work on blogs? My site has been made from scratch in notepad ++ Thanks
Try some different seo tactics, after being ranked number 3 for a day or 2. I decided to pull an all nighter to get up to 1st position - bad idea. Build some links in the wrong place and got sandboxed immediately. Had to submit a reinclusion request, and then google dance for 2 months. Anyways, hope this helps.