How Old Till A Website Stops "Dancing"?

I'll be honest, but I absolutely hate the google dance.

And the reason why is because everytime it happens, I'm led to believe that I'm doing SEO the wrong way.

My site is about 5 months old now. And for the last 6 weeks it has had a VERY stable, slowly improving rank for all of its most competitive keywords. Of which there are about 10 that I'm backlinking for the home page. All 10 were between pages 2-3.

Then I have about 75 geotargeted subpages that never dance, for long tail keywords. All of them are on page 1, but none are in the top 3 where they need to be, considering they are low search keywords. Most are in the #5-#7 position and have 1 backlink pointing to them.

So this is where I think I "messed up".

I was variating my anchor text (for my home page backlinks), and getting quality links from a private network I was building up.

HOWEVER, I was not building links with my main url as the anchor text, then I realized that could create problems.

So for 2 days straight, I built about 70 backlinks, that all use my homepage as the anchor text. After the first day (did about 35 backlinks), I saw a nice boost in a lot of my keywords. Which is why I did it again the second day. I figured it was doing something good for my rankings.

By day 3 however, all 10 keywords plummeted from pages 2-3, down to pages 18-26. So that day, I panicked and deleted all 70 backlinks. Then my ranks came back up just a little bit (like 4-6 pages), but they still remain really low in the SERPS.

So this is my question. Did I make a mistake by building that many backlinks in 2 days all with my main url as the anchor text?

I was trying to "balance" my backlink profile.

I was also getting greedy because I thought my site was getting to the point where it was old enough to get a bit more aggressive with backlinks.

Does this sound like the google dance... or like bad SEO?
Was removing the backlinks a smart decision?

I don't understand why a site will stay in a great position for 6 weeks straight, then just plummet out of nowhere. I think that its weird it happened right after I started targeting my url instead of various keywords.

Should I just stop backlinking my main url and target 100% long tail keywords/sub pages? Like what would happen if I got all my geotargeted pages ranking in the top 3? Would my homepage improve on its own as a result of that?

I'm looking for a way to minimize risk as much as possible, and it seems like the best way to do that, is to stop backlinking my home page, and just target all my geotargeted subpages, which are keywords like "service + town + state". Instead of just "service + state".

This is the second time my keywords have gotten close to page 1, then just plummeted out of nowhere. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

Any advice?

Thanks - Red