Even worse, I wrote several articles (no blackhat) this year that were heavily voted for on social bookmarking sites that caused traffic to spike many tens of thousands of visits to these pages. These articles brought in many links from outside websites, many of them authoritive in the field.

Know what Google did? The articles ranked highly for a week or so and then Google completely dropped them.

Why would this be? Could it be Google gets suspicious if you suddenly get too many outside links?

I did catch a number of websites copying the complete text of my articles and placing Google ads on them. This seems to happen whenever one of my articles hits it big on Digg etc. But I contacted them and had the offending content removed.

Has anyone ideas about this, or perhaps have experienced the same thing?