I’m becoming to wonder if the temporary ranking successes I achieved in this contest, were due to the phenomena of new content being temporarily favored in the SERPs, but then quickly being demoted after a day or two? Although I only made it to the middle of page 2, it seems like in both cases it happened 1-2 days after I posted the content, and then lasted for only a day or so.

It seems like there is a big ranking boost given to new pages, which is then quickly taken away in favor of old pages with the most links. This would make some sense in that it allows new content to be filtered into the results, but it will only stay at the top of the results of many people like the content enough to link to it.