Just when I was getting good at breaking away from failure, I am stumped again.

My traffic WAS up, my Alexa ranking was down, my earnings were climbing higher every day, them BAMB!  Off page one for my toughest keyword.

Dang.  I’ve been wracking my brains to figure out what I did wrong.

I enabled CloudFlare (a content delivery network that caches your pics, etc on servers around the world so they can present parts of your site faster to people closer to those servers) and the very next day I was kicked down to page 2.  But that couldn’t be the problem; I still have page 1 ranking for other keywords.

Too many links in article directories too fast?  No, that’s stupid.  Yes, I posted 2 articles a day, but I don’t think I believe that argument of getting penalized for too many links too fast; wouldn’t that mean I could destroy my competitors by building tons of links for them?  See, it couldn’t be that.

Site too slow?  This is the ironic part.  If I enabled CloudFlare via HostGator, that means my site is faster now.  So shouldn’t my rankings get better?

Weird thing is, if I test my site on site speed testing sites, they say I’m pretty quick.  But in the Labs part of the Google Webmaster Tools, it says my site is slower than 89% of the entire web!!  Freak, man!!

So I’ve been using their suggestions to get rid of extra code, pics, etc. and I’m disabling various plugins on the blog side of my site; the blog always seems slower.  Still not enough, though….

Webmaster Tools also shows lots of errors and pages not found; so OK…I updated my sitemap cause it was old and really was showing old pages that are gone; but even though I uploaded that like a week ago, those errors are still showing in there!  C’mon, guys.  Update your stats.

Did anyone important stop linking to me?  Yes.  I found one strong site with whom I had done a “trade” had stopped linking to me.  He re-added it.

Do get an extra oomph, I went to fiverr.com and bought some directory submissions (yes, I know, it’s old-school, but I had never done it, so I thought I’d give it a try) and also bought some social bookmarking.

So a couple nights ago, my rankings came back to page 1.  Now, 2 days later I’m back on page 2.  Man!  What’s with the dance?

I think that maybe the rankings will come back soon.  I’m still doubtful about CloudFlare really helping much.  I may cancel that and just order a VPS server.

One other crazy thing I’ve noticed; it watching the top 10 so much, I decided to check out a newcomer in my industry that’s been taking all the top 10 rankings for many phrases.  What I found was this one guy is really only doing link wheels!!

Isn’t that crazy?  I never knew they could work so good.  When I come close to doing anything like that, my web 2.0 properties don’t even show up in a Yahoo backlink search.  Weird, huh?  And that’s even after mass submitting the RSS feed and bookmarking them.  What are those dudes doing with their wheels to get them all found?

Did you know wheels could blast a person right to #2 in a very competitive niche?  I gotta do some reading up on them or buy some….