Awesome articles! Back in April, I had the same deal. It made me an SEO ninja (white hat off course.)

I want to know the name of his SEO company so that I can use them to 'help' my competitors in the same way.

More than likely what actually happened is some cubicle jockey working for Google in Bangalore or Mumbai thought the index page of the site looked like a thin affiliate site and clicked the deindex button. Poof! Gone!

Site Design Hint: to the poorly trained cubicle jockeys a site that has a lot of small text below a bunch of graphics on the index page is a thin affiliate site, even if you're selling your own products.

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this article is really helpful. thanks for sharing. but in my opinion you should avoid using the black hat techniques of SEO.

You just should have a look over the Google guidelines of recovering the penalties and more. But using the black hat techniques is not good at all.
Before a long I had the same problem and I just caught the black hat techniques on someone’s advice but after a short time all work done found in vain.