random drops in ranking and traffic from google only

[jake66]

google seems to abuse my site at random. one week i do insanely well, ranking page one for most of my target keywords; other weeks i slowly dip down the result pages one by one. no real changes in content except maybe a product addition here and there.

i take a look at each of my competitors, they hardly budge.. except they move up to fill the space where MY site once was.

this has been happening steadily for months. can anybody explain this phenominon? it's certainly not in my head, because a friend of mine is the one that actually brought this to my attention.

[piatkow]

As a result of a similar post I have checked 6 major search terms. No wild movements, 2 are steady on page 1 but 3 have slipped between 3 and 5 places and one moved up 6 and then slipped back by 3.

No idea why, I haven't inspected the sites in question but it annoys me when link pages are coming above my content. Curiously, up to early last year, my link page used to come in the top 5 in all the searches I am checking and now doesn't register at all.