Hi My site (caravans4hire.co.uk), was online for about 3 years (didn't really have time to do that much with it) before I decided to completely redo it, all the contents has now changed. However about a week ago I was page 5 for one of my top key phrases. Okay so page 5's not great, but I obviously intended to work on it. I have another site using the same format and that is position 2 for my main keywords. But the problem is I need to get it ranked high so that people will pay to advertise, and obviously the more people that advertise the more contents there will be for the SE's. So bit of a vicious circle. But my main question is why would it be page 5 one minute, then when I start building quality back links, it suddenly drops off. It's listed for stupid keywords and phrases that don't even appear on the site but not my main keywords. Thanks in advance Dee PS The only things I have done since it was page 5 are as I said start to get backlinks, also delete pages from my sitemap so that only the pages I want indexed are included, otherwise there would of been around 230 urls, there is now 9 (just the main pages). Also in Webmaster tools although Google is downloading my new sitemap, it seems to be taking time to update the overview page as it is still looking for 3 urls from the old site which obviously it can't find so I put a 301 redirect on those pages.
Don't panic just yet. I've had random days where a site will drop in traffic and search results. You may want to invest a little time in new content and backlink building.