I think it is more likely that a sudden twitter storm on a tail keyword triggers Query Deserves Freshness.

Example: there currently exists a bishop who will be the next pope. His web profile today is substantially smaller than BCC's, and is likely dominated by 200 word wiki articles, a page at his diocese, and perhaps some Time Magaxine profile from when there was speculation as to who would follow JP2.

His Holiness will eventually pass away, which is going to ignite an immediate Worldwide News Event that will cause query volumes for the top ten candidates to skyrocket. Google wants to return fresh results for those (e.g. not the pages currently ranking). Using Twitter to trigger QDF gets that hours before the link graph will reflect the new speculation articles' popularity, without requiring manual intervention.

This is, of douse, just one signal. Google News feeds, the query spikes, and sudden radical increased appearance of branded terms on trusted pages all point to the conclusion.

Yeah I thought about QDF, and I sincerely hope you are correct. I could swear that things like links from HN are showing the same decay thing, though, just at a different speed. There have been a couple of sites that I started from scratch and only posted over here -- they showed the same kind of peak/falloff.

Of course, it's not an either-or situation. Both could be true.

So far only a week has passed and we seem to have settled into the #12 spot. But it will be really interesting to see if the ranking sticks around. Sadly with this case study being dropped into our laps we weren't set up to run it as a test and only have "after effect" data to go off of.

I have done this before, to maintain and improve the ranking get a few backlinks that match the phrase you have already now on Google. I have launched about 15 websites this way and keep good rankings. Google sees the initial feedback from the social sites, lists your site, but it will keep falling if you don't get some matching backlinks pronto. If you type into Google cheap social marketing I have the first site, I used these techniques to get listed and rank the site. However, what I am offering is overly complex and I don't believe people understand the value of knowing Google's trigger points, when they notice the social attention, when other sites start taking the twitter/etc posts and adding them to "social conversation" websites, etc. All of this feeds back into your organic ranking as long as it is relevant.