An old friend of mine David, from Irish Tarot (IrishTarot.com) contacted me today to tell me his site had just disappeared from the Google SERPs. To Google, his site just doesn’t exist anymore.
Looking through his website, there doesn’t seem to be any issue with spamming or anything of the sort. There was an old issue with his 404 returning a 200, but I’d be amazed if Google dropped him for this.
We’re working together now to try and resurrect his site - will keep you posted on the progress! Any suggestions from SEOer’s welcome! 
Was he selling text links or anything?
Not that I’m aware of.
When his 404 page was giving 200s - does that mean that a request for robots.txt was returning 200 with a blank file? If Google is uncertain about the status of your robots.txt they will remove the entire site (after Belgian newspaper sites successfully sued Google).
Any message in GWT?
Hi Richard,
Thanks for your feedback.
Short answer, no. There was a robots file there, but I removed it because I felt it could have been causing some issues.
Any other ideas?
Tom
Oh and GWT - I haven’t logged into the account yet, but apparently it says it’s all verified and shows no errors.
Also - the last time the site was spidered was March.
Tom
Look for messages from your dashboard. Over on RHS, near top.
Google do not provide messages in all cases of penalty though. I’d also check to see what they have for robots.txt (under tools you can analyse robots.txt).
Rgds
Richard
Hi Richard,
Thanks for that - as mentioned previously, no errors nothing.
No robots txt file being used.
Tom
Odd. Best bet is probably to post something over on Google webmaster groups and hope that someone finds something.
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/topics
One other thing - what does it say in GWT under Stats? Does it say ‘No pages from your site are currently indexed’?
Latest update:
Google has picked the site back up again, indexing 4 pages. I’ve spotted another error in the meantime - again, not something I would expect the site to be dropped for.
[...] couple of months ago, I wrote about IrishTarot.com and how they had for some odd reason been completely dropped from Google’s [...]