soccer_star - 3:41 am on May 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, that one is a little tricky to diagnose, but we can rule out a few things to start.

You are definitely not in the sandbox as that refers to new sites (less than three months old) who can't rank well, whereas you were previously ranking well for a while.

If Google took offence at duplicate pages it would have just ignored your affiliates pages, leaving you alone.

And it doesn't seem to be any sort of penalty as you are still in the index (albeit low) and I assume have PR too. You'd have had PR0 or grey with a penalty.

So my guess would be a filter of some sort, especially as you come up as before with the "-dfdsdfffg" technique.

That could be anything. Do you have a network of sites on the same IP? Do you crosslink? Is your keyword density too high? Do you overuse H1 tags? I ask because all these are things that get you good rankings in Yahoo (which you have) but put you outside the top 100 in Google (although it too worked in Google pre-Nov 2003).