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To me, this looks like the site was dropped, not penalizes. The weird thing is that Googlebot came grabbing pages just about every day between the last update and the previous update.
Has this happened to anyone else? Is there a good chance of being back on the index next month?
Is this a new site, i.e. less than two months old?
Many new sites get picked up mid-cycle and are added to the index. Then they seem to pop in and out until the next index is published (It seems like the mid-cycle additions are kept in an off-to-the-side "new stuff" database which is handled in some special way to combine it with the real index). Some of these new sites drop out completely when the new index is published.
However, those sites which report continued Googlebot crawling activity after this happens often show up "permanently" after the next full indexing cycle.
Every month we see lots of "I was in, now I'm out" postings here from panicked owners of new sites, and it seems to follow this pattern.
My conclusion is that it basically takes two full crawl cycles before a site is really "in".
Jim
There is one bright point... traffic this weekend vs. last weekend is down 60%, but number of orders is only down 17% (sales dollars are down only 8%!). I guess it's true that Google produces a lot of traffic, but the conversion rate just doesn't compare to traffic from other sources.