Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

Starting back on Aug 16th last year I was one of the sites that dropped about 80% of the traffic from Google - after years of having no trouble whatsoever.
I retained good #1 positions for some "niches" two word phrases - however those started decaying away over the next 6 months.
I then saw one two word phrase go away that dropped traffic another 10%
Over the last month or so Ive been watching logs - and noticed unusual searches coming in - where that last phrase to go was still sending searched to my site - but only from specific countries, although still in the English results and not in the country specific results when I look at that countries search - example would be "hot widgets" - in the US results its gone completely.
In the Aussie, New Zealand and Irish Google domains its still #1 - all of these are with the hl=en parameter
Doesnt make a lot of sense to me as you would think if for some reason the US results were being censored (and yes its happened before to me) then they normally would be censored in all English results around the world - although I can tell by the other sites that have always been 2-10 that its not being censored in any form.

The other part about losing the 80% I have no ideas on and have been redesigning the site for the surfers I do have - noted that a friend who was dropped about 6 months before me has just started coming back in a big way.

I do use Google sitemaps and the site gets botted every day with no issues - actually a little more than it used to - and have never had any dupe content or even grey area issues that Im aware of - its been around for 7 years and has been rated by most in my industry in the top 10 sites of its kind for as long as I can remember