Can't Get My Pages Back On Top

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Hi Forum,
I have posted here and got some tidbits of advice but still can't get my site's pages listed for a keyword phrase in Google, higher than 1 page on a term with only 14,000 pages competing and that's #10 and not an earner anyway. (main page PR4)

Until 12/2003 every search term for all of my products were on top. I wrote 40 or 50 terms on an 8 1/2 X 11 peice of paper and checked them manually every few days, I had dual listings 1&2 2&3 1&2 3&4 and nothing worse for ALL of them on GG...and business was banging!

Now I get 100 visitors a day and lucky to make a few sales (low ticket stuff) and I'm panicking now.

I have another site with PR5 and had put a simple link on the "othersites.html" (links) page with some other reciprocals a long time ago. I removed it yesterday because they are built on the same "mall type" platform and have the same company name (not URL) on the bottom of the footer of each page. Google might not like this?

Now I'm thinking" what about that links page? 1/2 of my reciprocal links are to sites on the same site-bulding platform (if one store is having problems then most are..maybe same IP addresses?) and the ones I don't link to, are linked to the sites I do link to. I have found that some of my link partners (none appear to be using automated linking)...but some of them are linked to sites using & displaying link services - management companies.

So maybe the link from my other site, and the "web" of mall websites I have exchanged links with on the same platform is "penalizing" me or surpressing my listings, with the new Google algos, or am I missing something?

The site is in my profile "safety products site" and the SERPS are now owned by affiliate sites (supplier sells pre-made sites) they look the same w/o PR and no optimization to speak of - just different color schemes - but they're killing me. Time to "de-optimize" or?? There are a c few good sites up there too, but mostly not.

Forgive the long post! Thanks if you made it this far!