Rankings Tanked - 'View as Googlebot' tool shows oddities

[onepointone]

Recently the G rankings for my WP blog have tanked. Checked WMT and found nothing obvious.

However, I tried one of the 'view your site as googlebot' tools and am finding some odd things...

*random? short strings of numbers and letters thoughout the post, even the blog title.
*most of the links and nav links have lines through them.
*the CSS is nowhere to be seen.

Viewed with a browser, everthing seems ok.
Is this a corrupt or hacked database? Thanks to anyone who can volunteer experience w/this problem.

[tedster]

It doesn't sound to me like a technical problem has tanked your ranking. More likely it's something about the site's backlink profile.

Also, since you are using Wordpress, consider whether your server has been hacked [webmasterworld.com]. Wordpress hacks have been nearly epidemic recently, and many of the

Or, just a thought, how old is the blog? If it's just a few months, good early rankings that disappear is a common experience.

A few thoughts on the specific points you raised.

short strings of numbers and letters

This might be numbered character entities. You can get these in your blog's source code if you are doing a copy/paste from a Word document, and the original character is something like a "curly" apostrophe. If that's what's going on, both a browser and googlebot will easily convert these character entities to the correct visible character.

most of the links and nav links have lines through them

This might be a way of indicating that a link has a rel="nofollow" attribute - just a guess.

the CSS is nowhere to be seen

Most such tools would not style your content - they are just looking at the plain text, just a spiders do. So you will see the content in the order that it appears in your source code, rather than the sweet visual layout your CSS creates.