Great results that soon drop - please help me de-mystify

[punisa]

Hello again friends,

This is the situation, my homepage has many news articles and Google seems to love it. I run many analysis on it and according to all of my tools Google actually never leaves my homepage, it constatntly crwals articles.

When I pubblish some new stuff, especially if its breaking news, I see dramatic increase in teraffic almost instantly. When I check how keywords for the article rank - they rank awesome, almost always on first page and up there in top 5.

In an hour, more or less, I see again dramatic fall in traffic. Checking my rank again, I see Google "dropped" me down to the second page : (

One thing to note.
When my good results kick in, there is still no "cache" option on the result. I guess Google needs some time to create a cache.
Once it "caches" my article it usually drops it 10-20 results down.

Is this something "normal" when working with Google?
I'm 100% sure it is not my SEO practise. I'm the cleanest whitest hat out there : )
*which usually pisses me off, cause I my competition sometimes rank higher with description tag as so:"new widget new widget new widget new widget new widget" (?)

Anyway, any advice is good guys.
I *guess* this kind of behaviour has a name already, but I'm cluless what's its name : )

Thanks for readin'

[Rugles]

Is your Google traffic coming from news.google.com? ..or Google web search.

Because that would explain the burst of traffic and then the drop in traffic as other news websites publish the same news as you are and you get pushed down the list.

[punisa]

It comes from the main homepage, the web search.
Indeed in search results this is a case when I publish a breaking news, as it tends to rank other sources higher trusting them to be more reliable.

But I see this happening also for other totally non competitve articles I write. First grab is "very good", then it settles down as "good".
The drop is always 4-10 places.

[Shaddows]

I'd put money on the fact that its down to the fabled "query deserves freshness [QDF]" factor.

As you are a newsy site, you must be 'reporting' fairly cutting-edge information. Google gives you a big boost for this, which settles down to normal rankings after a short period.

On those type of terms, you CANNOT hold your atrificially boosted rankings, without constant updates.

[rainborick]

I'm with Shaddows on this. Pages that get included in the QDF or "Minty Fresh" index rank well for a short time and then expire, often before those pages get established in the main index, so they seem to disappear. It's very common with blogs, of course, but other sites see it, too.

[tedster]

...the fabled "query deserves freshness [QDF]" factor.

As of six days ago, consider that a fable that has been confirmed as true.

[youtube.com...]

[punisa]

Thank you guys, this is great bit of info I never heard before. It makes much sense I may say.