I have experienced the same and I would recommend you to not panic. It does not sounds like a penalty but because of the error bots found. Googlebots do always crawl and collect website activities and update history. If you can fix the 404 not found error then they could come back and crawl again.
I have already fixed all the errors( about 2 days after my server problems) and have also sent a reconsideration request to which i got one of their usual replies which does not really give you a clue to what actually led to this situation. Here's their reply: We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site:************* We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
just read about the mayday effect and was wondering if the problems with my site could be related to googles mayday update? can anyone confirm this please?
Just build links.Your problem is competition and nothing secret or magic.Work work hard and you will see results.I have been through this a lot of times what i learned? Build links and then some other links and after that just some more links.
What I can tell you is that if you have never done something that is not according to the Google webmaster guidelines, your penalty will be lifted soon, without you having to do anything about it. I don't think it matters that there was somebody who copied your site. Google knows best