big loss in PR, maybe Sandbox ?!

Hey

Don't know what happened but my site went down in everything.
- De aici incepe pokerul


I'll let you know everything that could be related so maybe you can help me.

First of all. My PR dropped from 4 to 2 and the forum from 3 to 0.

Possible reasons

a) Hostgator ded.server was a nightmare for mine. Starting autumn 2008 several visitors told me they couldn't access the site a couple of hours everyday (some more than that!). Hostgator said my site is 99% up and I could check that myself by going thru sites like pagewash.com. I did and the site was up. They said the ISPs from my country have some filters. OK, but I went to some countries in ASIA and I couldnt access my site from there even 6 hours/day! So?
Anyways, I just moved to a dedicated server in my country and nobody reported problems now. But I wonder if google saw also my site as 'down'.

b) I had a sitemap link @ footer but didnt actually made the sitemap yet

c) maybe someone reported me that i bought a link or sold a couple

d) Big mistake corrected only now.
For a while it seems I had two home pages indexed -

- De aici incepe pokerul

and

- De aici incepe pokerul

Now redirected.

e) maybe VBseo is not used properly?
I missed those times when I just started a new thread and after a while that term was ranked highly in my country.
And I used to have the first position on google.ro @ searching 'Holdem' or 'Holdem Romania'

Can you check if its in sandbox also?

Regards. This is a nightmare :/

Is it just your PageRank that has changed, or have you lost traffic?

traffic, serps (most)

How long ago did you purchase the paid links?

dont remember, maybe summer 2008

anyway someone else said:
"Usually you get penalized for what you do on your site or in your linking profile. They are looking for egregious, consistent, well-patterned, blatant, obvious behavior.

Buying 2 links does not fall into that category."

The hit I received is too big.
The traffic i get now is only from the people already knowing my site.

If your search traffic has totally stopped, then you have been penalized. You need to start making a list of all changes you may have done, particularly the paid links (on your site, or purchased elsewhere), any down time, etc.

The goal will be to correct any risk factors you can identify before submitting a re-inclusion request.

Actually I found my site on the 8th place @ search results for some terms. So just a big hit.

I would appreciate some concrete help, anything... But i know free advice is hard.

You should really do a brainstorm. Try to write down some quick notes on absolutely anything that you could have changed prior to the drop, or anything that could have occurred (like site downtime, etc).