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position #1 to #3 on page one for every term I optimized for ....now on page 5 or worse. Been down for 6 months now done an extensive overhaul of content and onsite, title tags etc as well as off site and nothing has changed.

Thank you for the clarification David. We know Google has the ability to consider code in it's algorithms. If you create a website, then use that same exact code and template to build other sites and modify the content a bit, Google can recognize the links are generated from the same code and devalue them. Google desires links to be independent and using the same code among multiple sites is a signal sites could be related. I have never heard of it applying to a general platform such as WordPress. In fact, my guess is most of the links to WordPress.com are from WordPress sites. The same would be true of any CMS software creator, forum creators, template creators, etc. I could only speculate and would enjoy to see or hear about any testing that may have been performed on this topic.