"We're Doomed Captain."
"Don't panic, don't panic."

I'm taking reference here from an old TV show in the UK called Dads army, very funny! One of the characters was full of doom & gloom, and the other one panicked frantically while shouting "don't panic" and this is very similar to what happened recently with myself & my friend & client, who's website suddenly vanished from Google.

He was the "we're doomed" character, and I was the one shouting "don't panic" while panicking like mad myself, wondering what on earth the problem was.

To begin with, I knew what the problem was - the Google serps fluctuate from time to time, and it's nothing at all to worry about - as long as you've done nothing against Google's terms of service. But as time went on, I too started to panic, because usually the fluctuations in ranking last a few days - and this lasted a few weeks. But I wanted to share this, to show what we nearly did, and what a mistake it would have been.

As a few weeks had passed, I started to worry that it wasn't just a normal Google fluctuation - and I started to look more & more into it, and had convinced myself that it must be some software that my client was using at the heart of his website - that Google was not keen on. This wasn't anything spammy or against Google TOS, but it was the only thing that I could imagine that could possibly have caused any issues.

I was literally just starting to suggest to him, that he starts to think about changing the way the website works, which would have meant a lot of time & effort, when hey-presto, the positions came back!

I now realise that we just weren't being patient enough, yes usually fluctuations in the Google serps do recover quicker than this - but not always, so don't take any drastic action, sit on your hands & give it some time, the chances are you'll get the positions back - even if it takes a few weeks, be patient.