2K backlinks, 1K articles, no traffic - because I am stupid.

This is a 'can you point me in the right direction what phrase I should google" question.

tl;dr: Google had no access to >1K single articles for 4 years, dropped me to zero traffic. What are natural ways to get Google to again deliver me traffic?

I have had a personal blog for over 10 years now, over 1K articles, over 2K links, everything natural. I managed to screw up my blog software without noticing it, so Google only had access to the main page and the archive pages. None of the articles was accessible (links available, zero content). Last year I discovered this and put it back in order, fully accessible and all. I have had no activity since on the blog except for one new article. Webmastertools has all links indexed, no errors or spam message anywhere, no seo ever before. Traffic is only about 200 visits a month.

How do I best recover from that without screwing things up?

My idea would be to just slowly start blogging again and add fresh content, similar to what was there before.
Are there any other things I can do?

Thanks in advance

this is the 2nd thread i m reading today that saying op is stupid ... is there some competition going on or what ?

Just self reflection. I could use idiot but it results in the same thing.

The lesson here is don't put all your eggs into something you don't control.

Have these articles been reindexed? If you do a site:www.yourdomain.com do you see them listed in there?

Would be a good idea to add some fresh content so Google starts visiting your site a bit more often, make sure your inter-page linking is good so it can easily discover those other articles again. Also, be an idea to submit a sitemap to Webmaster tools.

@IamNRE if that site does not have any more traffic from Google that would be sad, but not a problem at all. Since this is a personal blog new articles will be seen by friends either way, it is just that there is enough old material with which Google used to have fun and I would like that back - if possible. If not, that's okay too.

@homenet 100% indexed, sitemap available too, interlinking is clean (typical page -> archive -> article and each with next previous). Not the best for seo per se, but more than enough for adding it to the index. I think Google is just more or less pouting. Which I can understand.

Will start with the new content and see where that goes, looks like the only option.

Yeah unfortunately a lot has changed in the four years that these articles have been unavailable so trying to get that old traffic back could be hard.

Add some fresh content and a few good quality backlinks and monitor your traffic over the next few weeks and see what happens, good luck!