So here's a puzzle for all you SEO gurus out there. I recently launched my own site. I had target keywords which were ranking very well for about 1 month, within the top five and even appearing in first place. In an attempt to maintain good positioning, I followed guidelines by adding robots.txt, an xml sitemap redirecting non-www to www redirecting index.php to root domain adding htaccess 301 redirect for old pages I added rich snippets created a google+ account, verified my picture to appear, I went through each of the webmaster issues with duplicate titles and meta descriptions and improved header tag document outlines i even created a few more blog posts to keep the content freshing and moving. So now my website appears on page 2 with my target keywords - and all because I followed the guidelines. What is happening? I see competitors with stagnant content superglued to position 1.