V. Paladino:

What happened there is typical for OLD carpets.

You see, even the best vaccuum cleaners can't get all of the soil out of a carpet. Dead skin, pollen, paper and cloth fibers and other such household dust eventually accumulate in the carpet to the point where if you get that carpet wet, you create a bacteria's idea of heaven; plenty of food and moist conditions allowing the bacteria to move around and multiply because the moisture allows them to move around. If they're able to move, then there's vastly more food available to them than if they stay in one place, and that means the eat and divide into lots of little bacteria that look just like dad. It's that bacterialogical population explosion that is causing the smell.

That is, your carpet smells like a wet dog for exactly the same reason a non-show dog, one that rarely gets a bath, smells after a bath. The reason why is that the dog's fir is full of bacteria from everything it's rolled in, dead dog skin cells and whatever has been trapped by his fur. You get it wet, and the bacteria inside that fur multiply and make the dog smell. Show dogs don't smell like that after a bath because they get cleaned regularily and don't have as much bacteria food in their fur.

It's the bacterial population explosion that's causing the smell. And, that population explosion will subside as the carpet dries out. If you can put a dehumidifier in the room to dry it out, that will eliminate the smell sooner.

What that experience is telling you is that your carpet is at the end of it's life. A new carpet would not have smelled like that because it wouldn't have had so much food inside it for the bacteria to feed on.

Professional carpet cleaning contractors, when asked to clean an old carpet like that will use a bactericide in the solution tank. That doesn't get the carpet any cleaner; it just kills any bacteria the water comes into contact with to prevent that bacterial population explosion, and hence the smell. That way, the cleaning contractor can do the job, get paid and not get any complaints about the smell. He knows the real fix is to replace the carpet, but the homeowner replacing the carpet doesn't put any money in his wallet.

If you want to keep your carpet, the fastest way to get rid of the smell is to dry the carpet as quickly as possible. If you live where it's cold, one quick way to do that is to open your windows and doors and allow the warm moist air in your house to escape. Then close the windows when you feel cold. As the cold dry air in your house warms up, it's relative humidity will go way down, and it will absorb moisture from the carpet. So, repeat those two steps of releasing the warm air to the outside and allowing cold dry air into your house over and over again until your carpet is dry. The smell will disappear as the carpet dries.

But, the bottom line here is that you should really be looking at replacing that carpet with a new one, or chucking the carpet and installing another kind of flooring that bacteria food doesn't accumulate in.