Keywords Not Ranking

Sorry guys don't want to be another whinger poster.. have a site which was hit in the last EMD/ Panda update in Oct but only for some keywords. The only keywords really hit were on pages linked from a site wide sidebar link.

This has been removed, additional content added to each of these pages in question and a handful of naked URL's (mainly HQ article directories) linked back to these since then. A couple of other keywords to the domain which got a little hit have gone back up and so have a couple of other inner pages that got a slight drop in rankings. Nothing doing on the pages that were originally linked from the sidebar.

Anyone else had this and recovered? Is it likely a penalty and I've just got to wait it out? (btw pages are unique content, unique images, high quality and have been increased from around 500 to 750 words)

Depends on if you're actually being penalized, or if you're just losing your EMD bonus. If losing your EMD bonus caused your ranking to drop that much, you pretty much have to work to build it all the way back up. If you were actually penalized for your linking tactics, removing the links and waiting it out should help. The fact that you have a high quality site with quality content goes a long way I'd say.

In either case, it would probably take a little bit of time to recover. It sounds like you got a minor slap on the hand, but not a major rebuke.