Hello!

I feel that I'm loosing hope. I need you soo much to explain me why this thing is happening. I'll try to keep it short, but if you need more details I'm ready to provide them.

Basically I'm in the software directory business. A few years ago a new major platform by a big company was launched and I was the first to jump on the bandwagon and announce our software directory, where developers can submit their apps for this operating system.

I was the first and for quite some time there was no competition. Google gave me great positioning with all possible keywords, but the traffic was not big cause the OS was not yet so popular. Then competitors started to pop-up. Some of them were experienced seoers, who already had some similar site but just for another OS.

Then I moved to another domain let's say from "my-site.com" to "mysite.com" (without hyphen) ofcourse with 301 redirect. Then in about a year moved again from "mysite.com" to something like "myportal.com/mysite" where the content of the old mysite.com was now placed in a separate section of the myportal.com site. The domain myportal.com was existing for about 1 year prior to this, but had just a single "welcome" page.

After the first move from "my-site.com" to "mysite.com" the indexing didn't suffer much and I still was on the lead positions on all great keywords. At this period of time the traffic and popularity of this OS were growing very fast. But after the second move from "mysite.com" to "myportal.com/mysite" we lost almost all traffic and all ranking (((((( In both cases we used 301 redirect. In the second case the structure of the site was also changed.

We thought it was temporarily and continued to build the site, improve on-site seo and off-site seo. But traffic from Google was growing veeery slow.

Now when we try to build links to the section "myportal.com/mysite" of the site using the keywork "my site keyword" for example, Google DROPS this page VERY far behind and shows in the first 10 positions only the main page "myportal.com" (which is not perfectly relevant to this keyword) still behind our competitors.

What might be a problem here? Was I creating too many links with the same keyword to a single section of the site? I know I probably made a lot of mistakes along the way and probably received and still keep a lot of penalties from Google, but damn I want to learn how to get our of this! I know that my site a VERY helpful to the users and I receive a lot of nice feedback from them. My most successful competitors here are very sleek people (but very good SEOers!) and use half-automated and sometimes unethical tricks. At the beginning they were even stealing my content. They don't even host the software which they are offering for download on their servers, but hot-linking wherever they can.

But guys, come on, I'm not whining here! I want to learn the seo better and get what I deserve - my high positions and people who are searching for that what I offer with my site.

Please, please give me advices, tell me what's going on here. What have I done very wrong? What can I do to recover the positioning and traffic?

Thank you!