Ranking vs. Internal Link's Page Position

[Tonearm]

I had a bunch of internal links to pages at the very top of some prominent pages on my site. The links were getting numerous so I left some at the top of the page and put the rest at the bottom, after the main content. Google seems unhappy about the change and has dropped the pages that are linked to from the bottom section of the pages.

Is this possibly a transient situation, or does an internal link's position on the page matter hugely?

[Tonearm]

Actually, pages seem to be missing from Google's index that weren't affected by the above change at all. A few pages that were in the top 10 yesterday are nowhere to be found today. I'm also seeing them index page 2, 3, or 4 instead of page 1 in some instances. This is the first time I've seen that from Google. Doesn't sound good.

[errorsamac]

Check to see if the missing pages are result # 950. To do so, set your # of results to 100 (instead of 10) then go to page 10 and look for your pages. If you see them, welcome to the 950 club.

Here is the latest 950 thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Tonearm]

Luckily, no. I set my results to 100 per page, and the missing pages aren't on any of the pages of results, even with the "omitted" results shown.

Do pages sometimes drop off like this temporarily? The missing pages are all new within the last 1-2 weeks and were ranking very well at first. My older pages haven't lost any ranking.

[trakkerguy]

Do pages sometimes drop off like this temporarily

Yes. Sometimes they pop right back in place. Sometimes they flip between missing entirely, -950, and "omitted results".