what happened with this search term?

I'm sorry, most of the questions I ask seem to be related to google search terms and rankings, but the whole thing just continues to confuse me.

So, recently I put up a series of articles onto articlesbase.

1 of them was especially promising and made it onto page 5 of my targetted long-tail search term without any backlinks. When I started backlinking it by commenting on dofollow blogs that use the top-commentator plug-in, the article disappeared from google completely, then reappeared a page higher on that search term.

Now it's disappeared again, except it's just on that search term. It's still indexed by google (and shows up if you search for parts of the title without quotes or if you search for the term in quotes), but it doesn't show up for the long-tail keyword I was targeting, and it's been days since it disappeared the second time.

I'm not sure what to do about it, but I do know that backlinking with this long-tail term in anchor text won't necessarily make it appear for this term, since that's what I tried with another article on squidoo some months ago.

It's probably also worth mentioning that there are terms on the first page for this term with 13 backlinks and pr2 and 31 backlinks and pr0. I should beat those easily.

Another thing that's probably worth mentioning was that it happened to another article I put up a couple of days later. That one ended up on page 18 and when I started backlinking it, it disappeared from that search term only.

I'm thinking about re-submitting the article and outsourcing the backlinking this time, but what would you do?