Lost Major Rankings - Blackhat Problem or Another BooBoo?

So I have my service related website, about 2 years old, was doing really well. Optimized for my area locally. Did an xrumer campaign a month ago, gave it a decent boost. Site already had about 1000 backlinks to it. Did a 100k blast to it.

Well Sept 01st I made huge changes to the site. Did a complete redesign, most of the original linking structure was changed. In fact I had about 87,000 useless pages on the site that werent even in the index. Mostly just pages that all said the same thing except the city names were changed.

The homepage was ranking for all the keywords... not the inner pages.

2 days after making the major site change my site dissappeared. It's still in the index and has been for 2 weeks since it dissappeared. I have a few random terms i rank front page for, but for the most part its all gone.

Gbot continues to add new pages to the index, but none of them are ranking at all... they are all about 200th result. These are for keywords that have a total index result of about 29k and less!

So am I penalized?

My friend said he thinks its the fact that gbot keeps looking for the 87k pages that no longer exist and thats why I dropped out.

So what do you think, result from xrumer blast? Or my bad mistake? And how long should I expect to not show up for any of these EXTREMELY easy terms?

I wouldnt say it has anything to do with Xrumer. Sounds more like Google just trying to sort out what to do with your site after the changes. Have you still got the same high level of on page SEO done?

Going to be hard to give you any timeline as to when it will jump back into the results but just keep on your normal link building and hope for the best.

Yes the overall layout of the page didnt change much. Just removed a bunch of useless links. I changed the nav structure so all the links are now bullet point list for a little extra SEO.

The main change was changing to SEF urls from dynamic... But in doing this i also changed the dynamic link structure too.

Overall onpage optimization is the same.

Bing and Yahoo love the new changes. Goog is picking up the changes, and indexing the new pages.. but yeah no love, except on some really far out queries.

Overall content on the front page has stayed the same as well

Heres a screenie of my webmasters toolbar...as you can see it shows 87k "404 not found" and as it continues to crawl it may go a lot higher. Not sure what to do about all this now. Just let it die out eventually I guess?

Do you still have a backup of the old site design? I wonder if google would re-rank you higher if you threw the other one back up and let it crawl through it for a few days.

~UNdefy