financialhost - 4:29 pm on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Actually could this be related?

My site that got dumped had an email sent from Google a few weeks back complaining about DNS issues.

Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 33.3%. You can see more details about these errors in Webmaster Tools. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Use a WHOIS tool to verify that widgets/ has a proper whois record and that nameservers are configured for the site. If not, contact your domain registrar to update your whois records. Using a DNS lookup tool, verify that the nameserver's name can be resolved to an IP address. If not, either update your whois record to contain an IP address for your nameserver, or update the DNS records for nameserver. Using a DNS lookup tool, verify that widgets/ can be resolved to an IP address. If it can't, update the DNS record for widgets/ on your nameserver. If the site error rate is less than 100%: The most likely explanation is that your nameserver is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss the configuration of your DNS server and the possibility of allocating more resources to your DNS service.

I asked my host and got this response:

That's a rather silly blanket suggestion from them, and that is not likely to be the first cause of any timeout. No, the nameservers are not overloaded. Were they, you would encounter issues getting to your own site, checking your own mail, and so forth. What is much more likely is that one or more of their queries triggered a firewall block that kept whatever IP was in use for that query from accessing the server temporarily, or there was some kind of issue between whatever server was controlling that check and the NOC.

Notice - firewall block, maybe Googlebot was checking something unusual on the site to do with these updates in an non standard way and was blocked, causing the drop in rankings (Google thinking site is offline or broken)?

Could this have happened?