Google dropped page

Page drop possibly due to update

[abbey]

Getting a No3 position out of nearly 1 million competing pages was wonderful on google. But it was weird, as it dropped out a couple times and kept coming back. Now it has not got back up there so far, for the past 1/2 days?

Only change made was the addition of code below. I dont believe its considered has being hidden. /spy1.html points to a crawler page, containing nothing but links to every page on site.

<a href="/spy1.html"><img src="/images/shared/spacer.gif" alt="xyx keyword phrase." width="1" height="1" border="0"></a>

Anyone, any thoughts?

[Yidaki]

may be it's not the reason ... who knows?

However, 1x1 pixel image links is a no no. There's always a way around it. Why don't you just make a visible link Sitemap?

[Brett_Tabke]

How long had the page been in Google?

Even minor changes on results that big, can seriously impact the rankings. It could have increased the html size, changed the density, or some other qualification Google uses to rank sites.

Did the page just drop in rankings, or was it dropped from the index?