Ah -- I should have clarified the main issue...

Seth's answer (9th comment) and mine (10th comment)

EVEN MORE: the link to the entry had been the hit that was at the bottom of the first page of hits, pretty much uniformly across search engines...

MORE: the link that Google moved up was not exactly the link I gave in my post: I linked to the relevant comment, Google linked to the entry... [part of Seth's explanation was that Google was taking into consideration the phrase and the link, in an automatic fashion, I assume]

Correction: re: results for "craigslist criticism"

Sorry, Seth! you actually said "quite a few," not "most" (I guess I'm sensitive to the topic since I thought I did a pretty good job of not bringing up my blog unless necessary...) D.

....
Thanks, Seth!

Ah -- I should have better clarified the main issue. Of course, I appreciate you looked at it in general but here was what really puzzled me:

after I mentioned it on my blog, that link JUMPED from the bottom to the third (I would say that's pretty significant) AND is *staying* there -- which makes me think it wasn't something explained by normal variations in time -- AND that ONLY happened for Google...(not for the other search engines I checked -- those showed no significant change)

Delia

P.S. Again, I'm not at all familiar with these things -- that's why I asked you:)... I'm not sure what you mean when you are saying that most of the 140 pages when you search for "craigslist criticism" are spam? I hope you are not referring to *my* posts:), which do make up the bulk of it (I've been hoping somebody would take this topic out of my hands for a long time).

Although the topic of my blog is "craigslist criticism" I use this phrase very rarely. It's usually when I post a comment on a site and after a long discussion I just need to go... so I might suggest the person check out the blog *if* they need more information on this.

The vast majority of times when I make comments I don't even mention my blog (I enter it in the URL box if that's an option, just in case people want to check it out... but I'm just posting relevant comments to their post).

I do feel that I need to tag almost all the posts on my blog as "craigslist criticism" since this is the topic of my blog and I do try to stay on topic. I don't see how this could be regarded as "spam," if this is what you meant. They do not *all* show up when you do a search -- there is only one hit for my blog -- (if you want more you have to click for similar results).

There is relatively little spam among the results as far as I see... just some adult sites, that I suppose grab all key words they can get and possibly some innocents that list "craigslist" and "criticism" separately (I see that as an imperfection of the search engine, not as "spamming" by those people). D.