I Fear I've Trashed My Site by Over-Using Article Marketing

They say we learn through our mistakes. Here is one hard lesson I learned about article marketing.

In December 2007, I had a relationship site that was doing pretty well. Steady traffic, and I was ranking for some very competitive keywords. The site was almost 4 years old and completely whitehat. All of my links were natural and had been built over 3 years. I also had over a hundred pages of well-written, original articles (avg 800 words each). My site was sitting at a PR4.

That's when I decided to try article marketing. I thought that, at a bare minimum, I would at least get some solid backlinks and PR juice. Over the next year or so, I submitted over 300 articles to Ezinearticles (I didn't use any other article site) in 4 sub-niches of the relationship niche. I sent all the traffic to 4 internal landing pages.

My site is now sitting at PR1 and I have long since lost my rankings for every single keyword that matters. I am dreading the next PR update because I may drop to a 0. In short, I have received some sort of penalty from Google.

The only reason I can think that they might flag my site is that I may have overused a few anchor text phrases. That, plus the fact that everything was coming from one article directory.

I checked my backlinks and all the articles are showing up - ranging from 0-4 Pagerank, yet it has done nothing but create a negative effect on my site.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the money that came in as a result of all those articles, but I fear I've paid a higher price overall.

So my question is: Has anyone experienced this, and if so, how did you repair the damage?

I really don't want to scrap the site because of its age.

Steve