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For the past few weeks I was enjoying my first page position, but I was also below a few sites that are covered with hidden text. (the repeated keyword kind)
I decided that adding a little more content and cleaning up my title tag might help (I took down the star :) ) and now I'm warming the top of page 4.
My research shows that three of the top few sites that I was above are all designed by the same company. Is there a chance that they may be doing something that keeps knocking me out from above them?
(My paranoia is comming out again in this busy season)
That right there is too much information. ;)
There's nothing competitors could do that would knock you way down like that; sizeable shifts and shuffling around appear to be normal lately. And if someone's on the first page it's generally counter-productive to do too much tinkering. It's a lot healthier right now to just sit tight and ride out the waves until hopefully things stabilize. And if it doesn't stabilize - maybe because there's a bit of algo shuffling going on - then tinkering won't help, it'll just escalate the stress factor.
Not to mention that I'm having trouble with my backlinks disappearing. (I'm no longer showing my own internal links either so I must be pretty low on total links)
but if I don't get paranoid every few weeks I don't keep my interest and I don't learn any new tricks. ;)
Adding more words can dilute the focus of your page. Sometimes less works better. I don't know what your PR is, but I find that "generally" there's less stability with pages that are PR 4 or less.
