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I believe its a keyword/phrase based filter. Meaning, the site probably got too many exact anchor links and/or used too much of the same keyword or phrase in the title, description & main body.
Also, like you mentioned, it could be a duplicate content issue - try looking at the re-written content: where you use the keyword/phrase that you are targeting. Perhaps, it wasn't rewritten effectively to be pass Copyscape/ considered 'original'?
That's probably just Google Bot getting smarter and incorporating Semantic more heavily than before. The link that you mentioned is most likely what you are seeing with your site as I am with couple of mine.
It's time to re-strategize.
Making links 'nofollow' to preserve link juice is a thing of the past. As of now, the "link juice" that you think you 'saved' just vanishes into thin air. Meaning, if you do use 'Nofollow' on links, you won't be saving it and passing it on to others.
100 links on page is just a broad suggestion for most websites. Our website have 180 links on homepage and we rank pretty well.
I would make sure its re-written to a major extent that it passes Copyscape check otherwise there is a possibility of duplicate content issue. Also, if possible I suggest you try to refer to many other credible sources as well on the same topic and not just source from the 'larger organizations' piece.
You can try and a have a unique take on this much more comprehensive piece. This will do two things: make sure your content is considered original & it could also make content more "link attractive" - so you attract more links & get good returns on the extra writing effort.
The 2 links you are seeing in opensiteexplorer is most likely the 2 unique domains that link to you. 101 links in SEOMoz toolbar is the number of pages that link to you from those 2 domains.
If that's not the case, just make sure you are using the exact same url including the 'www' in the beginning.
We use DreamSystemsMedia, owned by Matt Siltala and they do a pretty good job at it.
Website: http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com/
To get Data for these infographics, you can refer Stephen's answer in this thread as it pretty much covers it all: http://www.seomoz.org/q/data-for-articles-and-infographics
If it's one IP I suppose SEOMoz would be ok with that, but I'd contact them just to be sure ~ http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact
What would work like a charm is if you did embed that video (linking to your site) from other websites. Acts a "video link" or sort of "votes" for the video on your page - increasing the likelihood of appearing on Google results.
Also, why not just use Youtube to embed. Since its Google's baby, they may prefer to display it over other hosted services. Just look at what they're doing with G+ personalization results.
In the long run, having a blog on your main domain is going to outweigh the benefits of having a separate one.
Google is looking for stronger brand signals and pooling all your great content and resources under one roof will play a key factor in SEO. If you have a blog on a separate domain and if you generate tons of links via social media.. all that "juice" is not being sort of 'transferred' to your main website, which I am assuming is the money maker.
Furthermore, Google is giving much less importance to 'keywords' in a domain. You can assume that keyword in domains is going to decrease in weight as a rank factor even more, as they can be 'gamed' easily so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Having a separate domain could make more sense for big brands especially if SEO is not of great importance.
Press Releases are a much better traffic/clicks generating strategy than a purely SEO one. If you just do PR for the sake of links or SEO, the 'story' probably won't be compelling enough and will likely only get picked by scrapers and lower quality sites - still giving you lot of backlinks but hardly of any real SEO/ranking value, some even possibly detrimental to your link profile if yours is not an authority site - since lot of duplicate articles with exact anchors will be linking to you in a short span of time.
If I were you, I'd do not more than 1 press release a month and make sure that the story/content is 'press worthy'. Make sure you have content that you think others (your peers or audience) will like likely benefit and pick up to share. Of course, this is could be very difficult or easy depending on your industry and niche and how 'press friendly' it is. Another suggestion - go with quality PR distribution sites, not those $9.99 PR submission services
You are looking at an extremely competitive niche and a very small budget - and this means you have to be 'super extreme' creative and careful on how and where you spend it.
SEO: To be utterly honest, even if you ad another 0 to your budget, it's still pretty difficult to invest in SEO and get good ROI unless you are going after the narrow segments within that niche i.e. long-tail (geo, etc)
PPC: I assume Mortgage related keywords cost you $5-$20 for every little click and your budget will run without having any data. Meaning, budget is not big enough that you could run a PPC campaign and know if the campaign was successful or not as you will run out of $ before you blink.
Others: If I were you I'd take that budget and go on the Guerilla strategy and do lot of forum promotion and genuinely try to help people and do classified ads - being careful not to "overdo it" or do any kind spam. Watch Yahoo Answers and see if people have any questions about what you're offering and answer them.
I would have said Google Directory just looking at all the importance Google gives to their own services (look +1, personal results, etc) but its been taken off couple of months ago - so Dmoz it is for Free. And definitely BBB for paid - great to give trust signals as BBB verifies business extensively and I am positive Google wouldn't ignore that in their algo. but its pretty expensive and time-consuming to get listed there though.
When it comes to links, I'd trust SEOMoz 100x more than any Google's tool, any day.
If you'd like to verify further, I'd suggest comparing SEOMoz link data with MajesticSEO
On-page looks good to most extent. If you just build 6-7 quality/authority links that are relevant, you have a good likelihood of outranking several competing sites to be at least on the 1st page.
If I were you I'd go for 3 word phrases first, rank for them (enjoy the traffic), and as you do that, you would be also building enough authority and trust to be strong enough to compete for major 2 word phrases. Having big goals for rankings is good but breaking them into small milestones makes them easier to achieve IMO.
We had offers from a quite a few well reputed News sources to syndicate our content but we declined those for exactly this reason.
These media sites are usually of very high authority and there is nothing much you can do about as of now to prove that you are the original source of the content as Google unfortunately still allows higher authority sites to outrank the original provider. I believe Google Authorship will reduce this issue to a good extent but right now if you don't want them to outrank you, just don't let them syndicate.
BBB is Better Business Bureau, an independent agency that verifies and accredits businesses - verifies address, etc. Their review process is pretty extensive (official visit from BBB staff in many major cities) and I believe a link from that site should be quality one, giving your site/biz location signals to Google
Here are some suggestions to rank specifically in one country
The first 2 points could be important or not depending on case by case basis (depending on competition, branding strategy, etc)
It depends if yours is a high authority site or not. If its a relatively new site or with low-avg authority, it could very well have fallen under the 'fishy' side of the radar.
Its unlikely that nofollow links would trigger a penalty but the # of links you mention here is staggering so I wouldn't count that out.
Also, Google made 40 changes 5-6 days ago, which is when your saying your site traffic fell so it could be that as well: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html
Thanks Alan - we are doing this as of now. I suspect it will come at a cost of conversions/ user experience. We probably we need a lot more testing and several pages to get the right balance and decide on one.