gethan - 11:12 am on Aug 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

Google Webmaster Help [google.com]

Scenario - top 10,000 alexa site, links from around 9,000 sites, community of around 20,000 active members, great reviews in NYT, WSJ, Yahoo!, etc, around 1 million indexed pages (Yahoo,Google,MSN) , 5 years of service. On the 20th July the site dropped from the google search index - traffic halved. The site can only be found for very obscure searches or url based searches.

No proof - but this does coincide with the actions of a very persistant spammer - who unluckily was missed by the moderators.

This is the event history.

~10th July: Spammer joins site: creates a member blog with V*~!ra or similar terms it. Doesn't get caught by administrators of the site.
~11th July: Spammer creates ~10,000 links to the created blog, listing spam terms. How? - I guess some spammer link package - all the links are from forums, comments pages etc.
~11th-15th: 10 new accounts created with other similar spam terms. Similar numbers of links created to these blogs.

20th July: - index page dropped from google, nearly all pages dropped, only obscure search terms bring up the site. site:example.com, allinurl:example.com show the site.
23rd July: - spammer found, accounts removed, spam pages removed (error 404's returned now), software updated to allow spam to be more easily identified by the administrators.

2nd August: - still missing from index - no idea of return date, major competitor occupies targetted search terms. Google help - disappointing. Seems that they basically funnel webmasters in to the sitemaps program.

I hope/expect that google will return the site to the index soon, but I do have some unease... I'm not saying that this was due to the actions of a competitor either, plain and simple spammer - we filter out hundreds of attempts of this kind of thing daily - these ones got through the shields...

So I'm currently writing sitemap scripts, for around one million pages this is quite complex... not what I intended to be doing with the next few days ;)

What additional actions would you take? Anyone had similar experiences? Anyone had good news after similar experiences?

Aside: really sad thing is that none of the none of the links in the spam blog actually worked... we use bb code - like WebmasterWorld - the spammer posted html...