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closeLook how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 15 years 2 months 14 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

While browsing through the stats of some (very poorly maintained) sites of our own, I found one that had zero traffic for quite a few weeks. Visiting the site, I saw no site, and just a “Cannot connect to database” error.

A glance at the toolbar showed me a PR zero, and indexed pages in Google (site:domain.com) brought up nothing but a few wp-content pages that should have been blocked by a robots file anyway. Sigh.

Further investigation revealed that we had a corrupted database, and by restoring a WP database backup from a Gmail account dedicated to backups, we had the site back pretty quickly.

A few months ago, the site was a PR3 with decent traffic, and now, it was a PR0 with practically no pages in the index. Bummer.

What Did I Do?
Inside Google Webmaster Tools, I went to Site Reconsideration on the top left, then “Request Reconsideration” in the center of the next page.

Here’s what I wrote:
We lost our database on this rarely attended WordPress site, and although we had traffic and PageRank, now the only indexed pages are ones that don’t even belong there, like /wp-admin pages. We’ve done nothing wrong, just left ourselves hanging in the wind too long with no pages there. Might we get reincluded please? PageRank back too? 😉
Thank you for your consideration…

How Did it Work?
I’ll have to let you know. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be back?

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