Website dropped from Google #1 to Bumblef**nowhere - My Story

This is what happened to 5 of my websites, just recently:

All of them had Google Page 1 positions, one had been on Page 1 No.1 for almost 2 years now.

One day 2 weeks back, my #1 site disappeared off of google, as well as 4 others.

There was no change in yahoo and bing.

After checking Webmaster tools, I saw, that Google Bot could not find my robots.txt anymore.

Robots.txt unreachable, but it was there. They are all wordpress sites and wordpress has a virtual robots.txt.

What the heck?

As google started to deindex my sites, I frantically posted in google forum, wordpress forum and here.

I also contacted my host.

After days in agony I kind of found out what happened, not why, but what.

For some reason my host blocked google bot. They removed the block, but I still had one site google bot would not access.

I asked my host again to backcheck and they did.

Here is their email:

A check of the logs shows that Googlebot was re-banned by an automated system. This system was removed as it was obviously malfunctioning.

Weird part, though:

Out of despair, I reentered my sites in Webmaster Tools as www.mysite.com (I had them as mysite.com)

NOW some of the www. robots.txt files google bot could read, while it still could not find the robots.txt for the mysite.com.

Except for one site, where Google Bot could not find the robots.txt neither on the www. not on the mysite.com.

Anyway, I just checked and google bot accessed all now and I am waiting to hopefully see them back up soon.

Google -by the way- suggests to enter the site in webmaster tools as both, www. and mysite.com. But don't forget to set a preferred one, because if you don't, they will treat them as 2 different sites, which means duplicate content, big NO NO.