Homepage error

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Shannel Watson: Hi everyone!
  
  I recently changed over to wordpress and thought I had completed all the redirects (the old pages were .html) My site rankings dropped and have been rebuilding slowly.  ;What I didn't realise is that I hadn't redirected my  ;/index.html  ; and this page for two months has been showing as 404. This was the main page with the highest authority and links by far.  ;
  
  So previously the index.html was ranking at 11 for a competitive phrase.  ; I managed to get it up to 39 again and now I have linked the index to the new home page ranking at 39.  ;
  
  3 questions;
  
  Will I be penalised for leabing that main page as 404 for so long?
  
  Should this lead to an increase in rankings?
  
  How long should this take to see the results?
  
  Thanks so much everyone!
• 
  Sanjay Upadhyay: i'm sure for one thing you will not get penalized for that
  
  2:- ; yes but it will take time to get rank again.
• 
  PromozSEO: We do not keep our home page with index.html (www.domain.com/index.html) because ultimately this opens the same page as www.domain.com and will create duplicate content issue. Make sure you use rel=canonical tag.
  
  Generally 404 page does not make any problem but as it was the home page and for a long time, it may affect.
  
  Technically 301 redirections work instantly but Google will take some time to index the newer page and after that your ranking will improve gradually.
  
  Build couple of authority links for the newer domain and use the fetch as Google from Google Webmaster Tool to accelerate the process.
• 
  Shannel Watson: Thanks +PromozSEO ;and +Sanjay Upadhyay ;
• 
  Saurabh Rawat: After Redirection you can loss 5-10% link juice. I think you should have to do some more link building. Web 2.0 blogs are best to get fast ranking back.  ;
• 
  Friedl Gertse: Web 2.0 spam, who still does link building?
• 
  Shannel Watson: I just had to get link delete to get rid of some blog comment spam that an seo company did for me without my knowledge
• 
  Sanjay Upadhyay: +Shannel Watson ; if you are deals in Local business, i would like to suggest you go for local citation submission. like yelp, foresquare, hotfrog, and many more, within few days you can get your ranking back and some quality leads for your business. ;
• 
  Shannel Watson: ok great advice.  ;thanks :)