Paying off cards should make your score go up. If you had the accounts closed out after you paid them off, then that can make your score go down. This is especially true if they were cards that you'd had for a long time, or if closing them out caused you to be using up more than a certain percentage of all of your available lines of credit. The general rule of thumb used to be that you shouldn't be using more than 50% of your available credit, but since all this craziness with the economy has been going on I've seen some places starting to say 30% instead.
Hope I didn't close an account that is for sure. I've reduced the percentage of credit used as well. I'm sure my credit was hurt because of all the moving I've done because most of it has been out of state moves. These of course come along with all the credit checks for gas, electric, cable, DirecTV etc each move as they of course were with different companies each move.