I’ve been getting asked this question more and more lately so I thought it’d be worth a quick blog post…
Here’s the thing:
If you’ve seen your site’s pages listed in the search engines one day, then gone the next day…
DON’T WORRY!
Particularly when your site is new, it’s the nature of the search engines that you’ll drop in and out of the SERPS (the search listings) frequently.
You’ll be there one day, gone the next, then back in again the day after that. It’s just something that happens when Google is first spidering your site, trying to work out what you’re up to and where you deserve to be in the listings.
The jumping around is RARELY due to something you did BUT there is of course the rare occasion when it’s because you’ve done something that raised a red flag (like suddenly had thousands of incoming links in the first week of a brand new site) and you’re being punished. But I must say that of all the people who’ve asked me that, I’ve never seen someone for which this was the case.
Ok, so have we got that clear? It happens, don’t panic, just keep building your content, keep trying to get links and it will allllll be ok 
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Yeah, I’ve tracked it a few times because it really worried me (at first). It’s typical for it to look like a sine wave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_wave), with large peaks and valleys for the first few days/weeks, leveling off to more of a “jiggle” over time.
It’s quite common for new sites to get the “Google Sandbox”. I experienced that from my own niche sites. Just continue to build quality content and links, you will be fine. From my own experience, my shortest sandbox took me ~1 week to get out and longest took me ~3 months.
This phenomenon is (informally) called the Google Dance and happens as Google tries to figure the best place for your site.
As the commentator above me mentioned, it can also happen if your site gets sandboxed, and when it happens, it’s quite unpleasant. However, the sandbox effect is temporary and will eventually wear off. Just hang in there! This happened to most of my sites, and in my experience lasts between two weeks and five months. I’ve that the more competitive the market the site is in, the more likely the sandbox will last longer.