packpack - 2:52 pm on Feb 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

A number of pages from my site fell completely out of Google the other week. Since your whole site is gone, I don't think this is your problem, but I'll state it here in case it helps anyone else.

A day or so previous my site had been down for a short while. But my hosts' servers weren't just unresponsive; rather, they were returning 404s from all my pages :O I had made zero changes to my site.

So I reasoned that what had happened is that Googlebot came rampaging in to spider when the site was responding with 404s - just my luck - and therefore decided to deindex those pages. This was confirmed a day or so later when a report of the 404s appeared in Webmaster Tools.

I immediately uploaded a sitemap and was respidered and the affected pages were back up in Google in a few days, but not before my hosts had cost me several hundred pounds in revenue. So I understand your frustration. Keep your eyes peeled on Webmaster Tools as that is your best source of information I reckon.