My site was hacked and I think google punished me, please help

Hey Everyone,

Here is the problem. I run a pretty popular hypnosis blog and I was either on page 1 or 2 of google for the following keyword "hypnosis blog" and many others.

Well about a week or two ago I noticed my site seemed to vanish from the top ratings. So I kept scrolling the pages and nothing. Now I would still find mentions of my site through social bookmarking sites and a few sites that were linking to me, but my site vanished. I was number one on goolge for hypnosis, columbus ga and even for my own name I was number 1, but now its like my site has been pulled.

Well I just figured google was doing one of the things google does and was messing with my site. Improving it and making it better. Well as I was messing around I noticed some hidden misc code in my footer. It has a no follow hidden div tage and contained hundreds of links to differetn spam sites or software. This could not be seen from the main page or any page in goolge or firefox.

So somehow someone got into my blog and after I found these codes I got rid of them and did a fresh install. Well I started thinking because I remember hearing google pentalizing or blacklisting people who do this. Obviously I didn't do this as I value my relationship with google to much.

So i started to wonder if this was the reason my site was vanishes as far as my actually domain name whatsonmybrain.com

Once again you will see mentions of my site on other sites and if you type Hypnosis Blog providing Information & Articles on Hypnosis, Self Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy, Hypnotherapy Training, Street Hypnosis Training in goolge search it will show my site. Now I contacted google through the webmaster tools area for reconsideration and told them what happened.

What I would like to know from all of you is there another way to contact them? Did I do this right? If they reinstate me if it wasn't my fault to the positions I was at before? I have worked many hours and many months on my blog and I'll be (cussword) if some hacker will screw my chances up with google.

Any advice, help, feedback from fellow warriors would be great. Any info of people I need to contact or etc.

Thanks
Joshua Houghton