Vanished after 5 years, weird links now

Can anyone tell me or even give a hint as to what happened?

[oigeez2003]

I've been showing up quite regularly for my main keywords in Google for years now. Suddenly, yesterday I completely disappeared and when you do a link search there's nothing. The only link I come up under is an old internal link from a Yahoo store that I closed 9 months ago (I switched platforms and then switched back).

The weird part is that the cache is of a new store that Yahoo accidentally deleted over Thanksgiving weekend (yes, I said deleted). That version of the page was only up for maybe 24 hours. When you click it is resolves to the right place, but it's all too weird, especially because my site is completely clean as far as I know. I've got competitors who use every spam technique in the book (literally-when I put the spam reports in I have to check every box when it asks what they're doing).

I have 3 other niche sites that were never cross-linked and they seem to be gone for the most part as well. But, again, I've got competitors who literally have hundreds upon hundreds of keyword stuffed url text links within their sites and they just keep moving higher. This couldn't have happened at a worst time - a deleted store and now no links to the new one (I should mention that although I got dropped when it first happened I was back on the first page within a day of putting up a new site).

I'd given up long ago on MSN and Yahoo because the entire first couple of pages have been almost entirely taken up by 2 spammy companies, but now I'm at a complete loss as of what to do. There is no way I can afford pay-per-click to make up for being shut out everywhere. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.