Hypothetical situation-- Humor me, please, as I'd appreciate your thoughts.... Let's say I have a site that has worked its way up the ranks over time. It's made it to page 1 of a great keyword search. Then, let's say I do something stupid... and I delete the whole page/site and replace it with crappy content, add lots of random unrelated links, and other useless stuff. And, of course, google notices this and bumps it DOWN the keyword search to page 9 or 10. THEN.... I restore the page exactly as it was before (when it was on page 1). Will google move it back up to page 1? Or will it forever be labelled as a junk site and never be able to work its way back up. In short, I guess I'm wondering how "forgiving" google is when it comes to judging the content of sites. Thanks. - FB
Your rank will return to what it was, or close to it depending on how long the page was offline. Pages get defaced and servers go down, Google realizes this so it will adjust your pages according to their current state. Example, Matt Cutt's done the hacked by a black hat crew trick on April fools day, if it eternally doomed your site he wouldn't of done it.
you can also write an email to Google, bagging them to bring you back to your old position, because evil hackers took over your site, but now you got it all fixed. who knows, they might open their hearts for you
Interesting example, with Matt CUtt. As I said, it is a hypothetical, so I don't really need to write an email to google... But this is still good information. Sometimes I think about tweaking little things, but decide against it because I fear the page's position will fall. I guess I wouldn't be so afraid to make changes if I felt confident I could get my position back. -FB