OK I may have screwed up.

My site showed up on Google, I ran an adwords campaign and it was doing OK, I monitored the results. I decided that it needed a few tweaks, maybe an upgrade and some pretty features.  I spent quite a while doing the upgrade and getting it approved.

I uploaded the site and sat back and waited for my genius to be recognised by the world. OK, that might have been expecting too much, but...

THEN I FELL OFF GOOGLE!

I couldn't believe it at first, I've read Google's T&C's, I don't have paid links, I don't hide links, I don't cloak or use 'affiliates'.  I am unrepentantly white hat!

Fortunately, our friends at Google provide tools to aid diagnosis, visit google.com/webmasters/tools/ - a quick look there showed what the problems might be.

Firstly, when upgrading my site I left the previous sitemap on the server.  The Google crawler had taken a look at the sitemap, couldn't find the files that most of the links referred to and decided my site was junk.  So I made a new sitemap and waited for the bots to return.

Secondly, when designing my site I thought that I should give it a theme so I created a "master page" and saved each fresh page after I'd written the content.

Google didn't like that - because I'd started with a master I had the same Meta descriptions in each of the pages.  I had even forgotten to change the titles for the pages... duh.  Maybe Google doesn't like lazy designers. So after re-editing the pages and waiting for the crawler to return, my virtual life will resume.

An incident of that nature makes you think, it's almost frightening to see the power that Google (which has something like 90% of the search market) possesses, it can turn off business leads at will.  Now I like Google, it strives to be democratic and meritocratic rather than a tyrant, let us all hope that it keeps that ethos.

I would recommend the webmaster tools to any amateur webmasters, Google is trying to help.