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I have a section of my website where I heavily use embedded content.  Embeds from Youtube, Slideshare, Twitter, Quora etc.  Google thinks they're thin, and they don't show up in my analytics because you can read the content without clicking on the page. http://getonthemap.us/twitter/blog But I like them, and I think they're helpful. So I no-indexed all but one of the blog posts in that section.  It retains the backlinks to the posts, but cleans me up with Google. If you're deleting, can't you do that quickly from your console?

Yes, that is the key - what has happened to the pages on the server?  You would hope that they still exist and you can revert.  If the site is in tact you can just remove any 301 or 302 redirects and restore.  It may be that Google has removed the URLs from the index but these would be crawled again once the redirects are sorted.