Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Okay, thanks to you all for the help.

@Ryan I've been reading your responses on many questions on this forum and I really appreciate how active and helpful you are.

Fact is SEO is difficult for me to wrap my brain around:

Here's the competitive domain analysis, I just did.  I have not done any "SEO" on my site at this point.  I rank #14 on google for my main keyword, I used to be at #2.

Obviously I have some work cut out for me.  I'm willing to do it.

The #1 site is in the second column, and before 2 weeks ago I hadn't seen it at all.  It looks like the domain was registered in August.  I've been searching through my competitor's Link Profiles on open site explorer, trying to pick out the quality sites that have naturally linked to them so I can approach them and start developing relationships.

I will report back....

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Thanks James,

1. Yes, the content is unique.  I think it could be improved in places.  I started this website nearly 5 years ago and my writing and webmastering skills were not what they are today.  I chased keywords a lot more back then.... trying to shoehorn content into places it didn't belong.

2. Internal linking is good, all content pages are indexed and there are no reported issues in google's WMT

3. I have quality links, but much fewer total links than my competition. Generally the anchor text to my site matches the keywords I'm trying to rank for.

4. I'm building out my social media presence. I have a Facebook Page that is #5 for my main keyword, that happened after this last version of Panda.

5. I will go back though and check these.  I have no warnings from SEOmoz for short descriptions except on "no-indexed" pages.

6. When Panda was released this last time there were several sites I'd never seen before on page 1 for keywords they really have no business ranking for.  When I check them out in open site explorer, I'm seeing that they have a lot of links, far more than I have, but the quality of the links is bad, spammy directories, spam wordpress blogs with some page authority but no relevance to the subject.  My site is far behind in the # of links and link domains.

Ryan thanks,

I am rebuilding the site as we speak the look had gone very stale and it looked tired and old, I will post the address when it's complete as I am far too much of a perfectionist/control freak to have people criticize what it looks like right now.

Truthfully, I chose a poor domain name 5 years ago, in the last month I've bought several exact domains in the niche and have them ranking in the top 6 pages on google already, on free Tumblr and Blogger blogs.  This is probably simply a result  of the QDF boost you mentioned.  What is the value of building up these domains and pointing them to my main site? Is this a good practice?

I had large adsense ads above the fold throughout a majority of the site, as per adsense recommendations. I've heard this can negatively impact a site in the SERPs.  I'm in the process of cutting those ads and dropping their position on the page.