[frugalwench]

That's not necessarily true. My Hubpages were doing very well just because of where they were, with no backlinks at all. Google had a love affair with Hubpages at the time.

80% of my traffic comes from search engines, and the only backlinks I know I have are crosslinks from my other postings.

Google is going through a transition right now, and a lot of sites are disappearing. It's probably temporary. They changed their algorithms a while ago, and I think they're still tweaking them.

I Googled "Hillary Clinton" to get news articles three times the other day before the news part came up at the top. Then it had 584 related articles. So how come it missed that twice?

I'm telling you, it's just tweaking.