Anyone who knows how to remedy this issue, please advise? Thanks in advance...

Hello everyone,

I wanted to get some insight from the resident SEO experts out there with hopes you can lead me in the right direction to recovery.

Here's a brief scenario of my dilemma. I have been trying to rank my own personal site for a particular higher competition keyword for some time. In the recent months, I've noticed that it's been slowly climbing up, and as of earlier this month, it was slowly climibing up even further and ranked #32 (page 4) of Google for the keyword.

I have just been doing what I can in building links and making sure to space things out so it wouldn't look sketchy. I wasn't focusing on anything major other than paying for one or two tasks that would promote my site and build links on bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Delicious, and so on. That actually was what started helping me climb up more and more to where I had reached page 4. So I would buy this task every month or so and the links were built slowly throughout a few days. Aside from that, I kept on regularly with an occasional post or two here or there, updating my site a bit, and so on.

Fast forward to my situation. Recently, I decided to buy another gig from Fiverr (yes, funny enough, the other task I mentioned above was from a Fiverr person who actually also helped me rank my Squidoo lens to page 1 of Google to which it remained for several months). I bought a different Fiverr gig from someone with an even better ranking and many more orders, who also did bookmarking gigs as well. I figured, I didn't want the same exact source doing every single gig and ironically, I tried someone else so Google wouldn't see the same link building from the same source.

Well, after that gig performed my bookmarking tasks, I waited a few days to see if it helped my site. Lo and behold, while my 1st Fiverr gig was doing well to help me climb up, it almost seems a bit too coincidental that after buying my 2nd person's Fiverr gig, that now, I've been ghosted and vanished to where I finally found myself today after putting quotes on the keyword search, I found myself in #434 with quotes (God only knows where that puts me then for a regular search without quotes for the keyword I was once ranking at #32 without quotes).

My thoughts are that this Fiverr gig may have done me in whereas the other one was doing well. This 2nd gig had offered a bit more bookmarking links than the first, but my main thing was that they were rated high and had well over a few thousand orders and another couple hundred.

So my questions are, with what I mentioned above, do you think I have a chance of even climbing out of the virtual ditch Google put me in? They haven't banished my site, but when I log into Webmaster Tools, there are no warning messages or anything either.

Should I just continue with going back to the first gig person I was working with that helped me climb up in rank? Should I change my website's content to a new keyword altogether and start trying to rank for it instead? Or should I send Google a Reconsideration Request regarding my site?

I don't want to cause any more problems on my site than may have been incurred, and I don't generally know the "Google Dance" to dance around for a couple of weeks or so which is where I've been so far. So I'm looking for the best options to try to get myself out of the ditch. Obviously, I was doing well in climbing my site so far, but given that I bought that 2nd Fiverr gig from someone else, that's where things seemed to go wrong after a few days of the gig's completion. Whether their gig had the impact or it was all coincidence, I'm trying to figure if there's a way to recover, or if I'm doomed to eternity below #500 or more on the Google Search engine?

Thanks in advance for all of your help.