Do access problems create long term ranking 'tremors'?

[danbot]

I don't want to start another thread saying "omg I've lost 70% of my google traffic".. which is essentially what I am currently experiencing. However this has occured to me numerous times in the past and it always seems to return.

I have a site which has been steadily building traffic from google search since 2005. And i have a theory I want to put out there to see if anyone else has similar experiences to back it up.

The pattern which i believe I am seeing is that these (can) drops occur as little tremors in the aftermath of an incident where access to your site is effected. The first time I noticed it was when i severely stuffed up the DNS and brought my site down for 24 hours plus twice over a period of 3 or 4 days. Following this, google killed my position for over a month and this continued to be up and down for the following six months. The more time went on.. the less regular and lengthy the drops were, until it became stable. About a year later I had an error on my site which caused most pages to appear with only their header menu, this went un noticed for days and as expected my position dropped for over a week following this (about a week later). Since this last site outage occured i have had the occasional 3 days to a week where my position drops temporarily.

Has anyone else experienced similar patterns?

[tedster]

I've never seen problems such as a web server down or DNS troubles create long term ranking problems after they are fixed. If the ranking disturbance last for months, I think it's safe to assume some other factors are in play that affect your rankings.