Lost my 'pet' keyword rankings but have more traffic than ever

is this sustainable?

[LisaWeber]

I've always had a pretty good 'long tail' showing in google - it's always made up the bulk of my money, however, I did have a few pet phrases that I have always kind of used to 'measure how I'm doing" in G. One of them was "<placename> travel". What's interesting, is that years ago when I lost ranking for most of my long tail phrases, I believe due to a major navigational change, I still maintained decent ranking on this pet phrase. At one point my site was number three for this phrase, but for the last four or five years it has been number 6, 7, 8, or 9.

Today it is gone. I didn't check to see exactly where I am, but I'm not in the first 5 pages. However, I am getting about 30% more traffic today, and along with that about the same amount more money in adsense. Now, my pet phrase never brought in a lot of traffic, and it pointed to my home page, and that page did not have adsense, so I'm not surprised the loss has nothing to do with income levels. I am surprised, though, that the loss of rankings for this phrase does not reflect loss of rankings for my entire site on all my long tail phrases. Is this a new trend? Any similar stories or theories?