had #2 position for one day, then gone!

[tcady]

Ok, this is weird - I use Web Position Gold and I run it twice a week, monday and thursday, to check my rank on SEs. For my MOST competitive keyword string "vibratory feeders" I am either not even in the top 20 on most SEs, or between 15-20 in a few.
I HAVE NOT made any changes to my site in the last fe weeks. MOnday, my site went to the number 2 spot in these search engines, first WebPosition rpeorted it, then I looked for myself with a manual search on some of the popular ones like Yahoo and MSN. And there I was at #2, I was soooo excited! to say the least. And yes I was at spot #2 exactly ont hem all.... Now I am gone, I was there for like one day, and now I'm back to lowly 15-20 or not in the top 20 at all. I know it is not a glitch in WebPosition because I looked at the SERPS myself one a few of the SEs the day I was at #2 (This Monday July 26) and I saw it with my eyes.

My question is: are these SEs are results related?
If not, how could this happen?
Has anyone seen it happen with their site?

My site is 6 months old, it has already gone thru being in the top 10 for the first month, then dropping off, then coming back to a more stable position over the last few months, albeit lower....so this is not a "new site dance" bit I will let you know if I see this drastic change occur again - I will be watching my reports closely...

Here's the SEs I was #2 for one day on:

Excite
AltaVista
HotBot
Looksmart
Lycos
MSN
Open Directory
Yahoo

[nickc]

They are not all related. Probably just a glitch. Don't get too disheartened. Just keep going and you'll get there eventually.

Nick

[ADAM Web Design]

Looksmart and Open Directory are human-controlled directories, not SEs. So any ranking you get from those sites will be controlled by Big Brother (i.e. the human editors), and you're pretty much held to their whim.

What you may want to try is either setting up a page specifically for vibratory feeders with nothing but "Vibratory Feeders" in the title tag, or shortening your home page title tag to just "vibratory feeders". All the "engines" that you have listed (the reason I put "engines" in quotes is because they're all drawn from the Inktomi database) look at <h*> and <title> tags for their information. So, all you'll want to do is put Vibratory Feeders in your <h*> tag and your title tag, build up some backlinks to that page, and you'll likely notice the effect you want to.

[buddhu]

If you use WPG take precautions or you may possibly court further problems.

WPG and similar automatic submission and rank checking progs are exlicitly prohibited by may engine Ts & Cs.

If you need to use it take precautions.

Don't run your reports more often than you must; don't run them for more keywords than you must; don't run them from a computer using the Google toolbar; clear cookies before each run; run them from a dial-up connection to an ISP that assigns dynamic IPs. Also, make sure it's an up to date version of WPG - older versions apparently passed information that cooud potentially identify the domain from which the queries were being run. The current version claims to have addressed this.