Ranking stuck on the 10th position - sitewides

I have many sitewide links to one of my websites. Google shows 530k links from 1400 domains (but my internal calculation is double than 530k). It did get me to where I am - ranking on very tough keywords, but it seems that since Penguin 4 last year in October it's only a downwards spiral.

I don't know if it's because there were domains that were lost or the insane backlinks/unique domains ratio. I ranked position 1,2 for many though keywords and now I'm 6-13.

Your thoughts?

Emmm, Very hard to tell. You upped ur game and very few can tell you.

I would say start by analyzing those who took ur positions. Analyze their ranking history and match it with their backlink campaign to find out what they did to take ur place.

I believe your website didn't go down, but your competition are going up. I also think this is no the first post of urz where I commented, you were talking about similar topic if I am not mistaken.

Very few people can help you with these types of questions, so take care!

Yep, a doubled edged sword I guess. Trying to find someone in my position. I have analyzed the competition and some are multinational brands with 70k unique domains and some with 1k.
Because of this method I have trouble comparing anything.. I don't know if there is a calculation of backlinks/domains ratio at all.

I do not think that it is the problem of site wide links. Google can not take action only for your site for using them.

As mentioned before, maybe your competition built new links and that's why.

I don't thing there is one.. I have seen weird ratios and websites are doing great.

However, I do believe google treat sitewide links differently from normal links. Like I told you before, you should be very cautious and know the rules before playing with it but you didn't listen

Anyway, I believe the fastest way to learn is by making mistakes.. So, no losses

Have you looked at the competition and tried to see what they are doing differently (If anything)?

Also couple of things that come to my mind -

1.I know you said site wide links, so I am guessing its like footer links or blogroll links or similar? I think recently Google changed their strategy in that they don't penalise links as much any more, but they think they are much better at discovering links that are there for the purpose of passing juice (These site wide links I am guessing might be a big red flag for Google) and they just discount them completely. So it could be that a large percentage of those links are now just being completely ignored by Google, meaning that your profile is not as big/strong as you think.

2.What about anchor text ratio? especially with site wide links it potentially means your anchor text might be too heavily weighted towards your keywords (I dont know about this, its just a guess). What are the competition doing for anchor texts? You know that now days I think google are considering much more carefully anchor text and looking for lots of LSIs, related keywords etc. maybe its to do with that?

3.Content on your site - has it been updated recently? maybe it needs some rejuvenation?

Disclaimer - as someone else said above, it sounds like you know your stuff so maybe you have already considered all of the above, but its just a few things that immediately spring to my mind.

The competition does something else completely - contextual links from 1k domains (1-5 pages per domain) + a handful of sitewides links from very related websites.
They buy expensive links and keep the anchor ratio down by linking images and the website's name when they do sitewides (just a guess btw, doesn't mean that that's what works).
They also link to the homepage & 4-5 inner pages while I'm focused on just one main page.

1. I thought about devaluation of the links, it could be.
2. Anchor ratio is obviously a key thing that is also a problem, but it's hard to measure and to combat it. For example, what would you do to change an insane anchor ratio
of 30%? add 100k more links with different anchors or reduce what you have already? - and in case you do reduce, what if it's what made it go up in the first place and you'll get whacked? if you add maybe you'll get whacked too.
3. I don't think it's content related since from time to time it gets updated and the competitors don't update most of the time. When I update the content the keyword usually go down and then back up again to the same positions in a couple of days. The usual stuff.

So it could be anything - devaluation of links, anchor distribution ratios, relevancy of the pointing links, total links/domains ratio.
This didn't happen to only one website btw, same happened to other websites I own across different niches.

I contemplated everything but don't know what to act on since there are many potential culprits, what would you do first?

google counts similar links as one.

imo this is smart for them, because lots of webmasters use or create cmses that do duplicate content on their own - so instead of penalysing and deranking everything it jsut discounts it

I don't really buy this notion because in my expirence it's simply not true.