5 Years Playing the Google Game

Hiya,

To start this post off, here is a bit of information about the site in question, keep these figures in mind as you read the post. As of today my website is a Six year old website, PR5, 10k+ links in site explorer, 44k pages, no ads or outbound links.
Currently I have a love hate relationship with big G, one, I have done very well financially with them, two, it seems they have capped me unless I spend more money.
Your probably wondering about that last statement, let me clarify. It's been a very long road reading forums like this and learning SEO and link building to get the site to the level it sits at today. But there have been some very strange oddities along the way.

Our company spends upwards of 45k monthly with big G on PPC, and we have a full time dedicated account manager from G that is assigned to our account. This traffic is completely separate from the 20k uniques the site gets organically.

I have many pages throughout the site I can use for this example, but I'll just stick to one since it has been the most obvious example of what I'm about to chat about.

The keyword in question is about a 1k to 2k a month keyword in terms of my spend in PPC. So I wrote a monster article on this subject and keyword, keep in mind this was about 3 years ago and I dropped it on the site, it was indexed within a day or so and showed up at about page 18, and so the game begins.

So whats the next step, can anyone guess? We throw some links at it right? We want to start pushing it up. I started out with a well written article on the subject and submitted to ezine and got a few blog posts done on high PR blogs related to the niche. These were indexed right away and showed up on site explorer and in webmaster tools within a week or so, and I made massive movement, a jump of about 10 pages, landed somewhere mid page 8. So I did a heavy spin of the ezine article and dropped it on a couple other well ranked directories got a couple more blog posts and did some forum posting, keep in mind that this took place over a month or two may be even three (long time ago hard to remember).

Another major jump, now we are sitting mid to high page two and traffic is starting to come in on this keyword organically. Guess what happens next?? after a month or two of sitting at the top of page two, I notice when I log into webmaster tools that the links are dropping and its happening fast, they are still there in site explorer and I can go to all the pages and still see the blog posts, articles, forum links, etc, everything is still there, WTF is going on why are they vanishing out of webmaster tools!
So inside of about a week I only have about 2 or 3 links left in webmaster tools, ezine and a blog post or two.

Guess where my ranking on G went, page 10. I'm like, "what the heck just happened here."

And keep in mind it's in the top 5 on yahoo and msn. So it didn't happen with those guys just G. So I start the process again, get it to about page 2 and bam links vanish from webmaster tools and I drop. As of today I am on the forth round of this process over a 3 year time period and currently sitting on page 7 for the keyword, and Im sure the same thing will happen again when I get to high of ranking again. Now many ppl talk of big G like it's some God in the sky watching over all our sites, well I don't think this way, it's a bot nuthin more. But my situation is a bit different then most.

So I have some ideas I'm going to put in front of this community and they might be wild but I think they have merit. It stands to reason that my Big G account manager gets a commission if I spend more money. Her emails stating to check out these keywords and ad's she added to my account are working great for competitors and she added them to my adgroups and put them on pending and to turn them on if I think they are good (and they usually are awesome) thank you G.

So I spend more money from her great work, but I also make more money, so its all good.
Now if I rank to high organically for these keys it stands to reason I will cut back my ad spend right? Of course I will, She knows it, G knows it and I know it.

So back to the article that I wrote about earlier, could it be links are being discounted so I don't rank to high for this keyword, remember I have dozens of examples of this but Im just using this one article for our example here.

My thought, and I'd like to hear from the experts here on what I might be missing.

Three Points

1) Someone is evil at G and is nuking, discounting, or whatever, the links so I don't rank to high, as seen by watching links vanish off webmaster tools and the ranking drops, thus keeping me spending the heavy doe rae me. If so, ok fine!!! I'm making out great any way, and shouldn't waste my time on building links for these keys anymore.

2) Something I'm doing?? Angela type profile links and the like and who ever is watching over me at G doesn't like it.

3) Cry baby competitors, everytime I make a run for the top the competitors for these keys start to cry like little babys and log into webmaster tools and report me. Although all my links are legit, what the heck is wrong with a article or profile or blog post anyhow.

I'm starting to think the whole "Do no Evil" thing of Big G is a bunch of BS, because anytime you get money involved and a person stands to gain and someone else can take that away (like me by ranking higher organically) then they will do evil.

Your thoughts opinions and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks for your time...