It happens to me from time to time
How I rank on a particular search engine can fluctuate sometimes for me. Like last month I had a pretty major move upwards on yahoo moving up a significant amount for some pretty competitive terms and then I lost it all this month for those same terms. Do not know why but it happened.
On Google it is not unusual for me to move from spot number 4 to 8 back to 6 back down to 11 for one of my more competitve search terms.
It could very well be that the search engine devalued the sites that you links from. I know a lot of blogs that do paid links have been hit pretty hard in their rankings by Google in the last few months. Google has also been warning if the majority of your inbound links have the same exact anchor text, your rankings will suffer as a result.
My response to these events is to go out and try to build more links with varied but similiar anchor text for less compettive keyword phrases. While I do not get a ton of traffic from these phrases, I can get on the first page of google in a short period of time and the traffic converts at a higher rate than more general terms. I have increased my traffic by 75% since Xmas by doing this.
I hope this helps.
All the best,
Hans
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