Originally Posted by kane

I sometimes think Google is trolling me. Recently I had a site that was varied from #1-#3 for a keyword. It was a very specific keyword and drove in some nice targeted traffic. Then out of the blue one day not only was I gone from the serps, every serp in the top 40 now has nothing to do with that keyword.

I just keep working and in some cases end up getting those rankings back once Google realizes that its not just a spam site, but an actual quality site.