I think my site's home page is penalized by google I dont remember any in solicit activity in past. when I search for www.mydomain.com, I see the sites linking to my home page but my own site is way behind.
if your home page does not appears in your search maybe there's a problem... maybe... you do something that google sees as illegal that's why you are banned... according to EVAN CARMICHAEL Google may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law, if the sites do not meet Google’s quality guidelines, or for other reasons, such as if the sites detract from users’ ability to locate relevant information. We cannot comment on the individual reasons a page may be removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index. Please read our Webmaster Guidelines for more information.
i think you site is not punished. i'm sure that your site will come back in week. continue to build backlinks and wait
Well as far as knowing if your site being penalized, you probably won't know. Engines use different algorythms(complicated formulas) to determine this and they are constantlym changing. So you might be high on the search engines today, and way deep in the search engines tomorrow. You can probably try changing something on your site and then updating it to see if your ranking changes.
I had some adultery words in my meta description and this might be the reason of penalty. I have changed meta description.