Ranking, Very Confused

Drastic changes in 2 days

[ffctas]

After the major end of month crawl on google many of my page listings moved way up in the google search pages. I attributed this to the changes I made on these pages from information gathered on webmasterworld. I was very pleased.
To my dismay, 2 days after these pages (search words) were respecively #1 and #2, they have been dropped to #36 and #38. I did not make any changes to these pages during this time. What's up. thanks for any help
tom

[fathom]

Hi ffctas & welcome to WebmasterWorld. ;)

Three possibilities here:

1. It is possible that Refresh bot picked up the changes you made and due to the limited other pages which it crawls pushed you higher than where you normally would be.

The short term boost is good but short lived as the bot continues to this so Google results has the most "recent" changes high in its search results, and your "last week" changes are not as recent as someone elses "yesturday changes".

2. Cause & Effect - when change occurs we natural assume the to most recent amendments we have made are the reason. However, this can also be changes made months ago and just now being added to the mix.

3. I make a change, you make a change and it's reasonable to assume everyone else who is concerned with rankings is making changes, thus if your changes are less than others, you will be effected by "result creep" in the wrong direction.

Likely though... #1 the most likely.