I've heard some intellignet conversation on this site, so in my confusion, I came back here.

I have a small, investigative site that's dedicated to exposing some nasty predatory journalist/bloggers. (It's all the rave now, I guess.... )

The head of these bloggers is quite nationally well known.

Yesterday at 11:00 AM, my site, which had been steadily moving up the Google ratings, Googled at the very top of page 2.

I had quite a few hits yesterday - more than the day before.

But last night at 6:00 PM, I couldn't find it at all...not even after 26 pages.

I found that a little strange, and without making any paranoid conjectures, can anyone speculate as to how this might happen?

Thank you!

It happens all the time and isn't part of a nefarious scheme against your site. Google's rankings shuffle all of the time. This might be temporary while an update occurs or may mast longer if your site is sandboxed (or whatever you want to call it).

It does happen sometime in the middle. You just wait and watch for the another week.

You were right!