A fellow local MUG member posted this to our group. Means nothing to me but any thoughts from you experts?

Can anyone shed any light on why our work website suddenly dropped off all searches some weeks ago? We suspect sabotage by a rival, as we can't think of anything else.
For years its normally in top ten for any of our search terms - we check fairly regularly. Now, even keying in the company / website name brings no results in google, Ask, Yahoo. It didn't seem to coincide with any alteration of the site, and even when we've added pages in the past this hasn't happened. The host, Netcom, have no ideas. Entering the URL directly brings the site straight up.
Is it possible to sabotage a site in this way?
I can't seem to find any help on the net, but then I'm not really sure what to search for!
All help gratefully received. Won't give site name here without checking with the boss, and I may be overlooking something obvious!

Thanks

Paul

I'm not a web dev by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought that the robots.txt file embedded in a site indicated if it was to be indexed or not by search engines. Maybe that was changed?

[www.robotstxt.org]

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2013 08:18AM by ztirffritz.

If you piss Google off, they remove you from the results.

For example if they think you are a spammer, fake landing page, etc. A couple of these are easy to trip.

Maybe some DMCA takedown?

I have passed your responses on.

Thank you

Paul