Your thoughts to this analytics-stat?

Im not pretty good at seo but I started a nichesite some months ago to see if I can reach good serps. First it was a bunch of mini-niche-sites like hotboy did but then I merged them all in one big nichesite where there is a page for each keyword. Nice colors taken and the menu is selfoptimizing to ensure that links appear that are of interest and/or relevant. I think it is raising the pages/visit.

I had 4 german pages and 85 pages in english on that site. They are divided in menu per language so that they are linked to only in the correct language.

The domain I used was old but had other content on it before the nichesite. I redirected the old mininichesites to the new one with 301 redirect so I had some initial backlinks.

Then I started to bookmark the pages with BMD. At the end I had around 2000 extra backlinks to the whole site. That number showed up in yahoo site explorer at least. Then I stopped to see what happens. I didnt do any backlinking anymore since then.

The serps were raising slowly but then one day the serps for the english pages were gone... not fully but nearly. Seeable in the stats. I thought maybe I had too many backlinks stored in the social bookmark accounts and they were deleted. I thought so because I had different accounts for the german and the english pages so that I can use language-rss that match my backlink. And the german serps were still good. Only the english one dropped. So I thought my accounts were deleted... the number of backlinks in yahoo were dropping all the time too.

Then some time later the same happened to the german serps.

I didnt do anything to see what happens and 2 months later I suddenly had 100 visitors again per day... I checked the serps and they were good. Better than before I would say... This was that way for 6 days and then it was gone again...

So I see this and im wondering what is google doing there? Was this a test to see... what?

I think I already know what you would say to do... keep building backlinks... Maybe I will do this in the next time... for now I didnt want to believe that seo really means constant work... but does owning a site and pushing it with backlinks really mean you have to constantly work for it to keep it at that level? And isnt there a point somewhere where you can stop and it works for its own? Or is that a unnatural behaviour? Maybe because the type of the site or my backlinks were wrong? But if thats the case google wouldnt need to give it another week for testing...

Whats your thoughts?

Sounds like the Google dance.

As for links, when you start a campaign to promote a site, build various links to the site steadily. Once the G dance is "over" (it's never really over but slowed down) then you can ease up on the backlinking. Don't be surprised however, if you move again. The top 10 results are very volatile, so keep an eye out and build links when you need to.

Also, your bounce rate could have something to do with it as well. My autoblogs get better rates than that. Maybe your page isn't targeted enough for the keyword?