Rankings dissappearing from Google

A few months ago, our site, www.time4fishing.com was in the top 5 almost always when there was a phrase containing "saltwater fishing" or "charter boats". I noticed we were dropping on some phrases so I started to try to make changes to help recover our rankings. Nothing I have tried seems to be helping stop the deterioration of our rankings. Does anyone see anything obvious on www.time4fishing.com that would cause a drop over the past several months?

How old is the site? If it was new a few months ago then what happened was you got a "new site boost" and now that has been removed. If that is the case then you can only promote your site normally and try to achieve those rankings permanently. If your site has been around for a while and this happened your best is not to change anything as it may be only temporary. The best thing you can do either way is to promote your site and seek relevant backlinks. That's always a good thing for Google.

We have been around for 6 years. Did backlinks become much more important in the last 12 months? Our backlinks have not changed a lot. It looks like our primary competitor is using "tricks" and "gimics" to generate more content that changes frequently. Like RSS feeds. It seemed that the more content I added the lower rankings went. On the backlinks site I found here we have about 360, out biggest competitor has over 19,000 (a lot for a charter boat directory and sounds suspicious). It also looks like they have an excessive number of keywords (30+) and they are only separated by a space. Also, it appeared that they appeared all of a sudden. Any comments from anyone?

As for what is spammy and what is not is up to Google to decide. Much of what competitors call spammy really is either just creative copy or nothing noteworthy. If that content really was bad Google wouldn't be ranking it so highly. (It is also possible that Google just isn't adept at weeding it out yet). If you really think they are using black hat techniques then report them to Google and see what happens.

And links have been losing their power as time moves on but only because Google is getting better at determining real link value. Links that may have helped you before might be helping you out less now because they may not be on relevant pages and such. Plus if your competitor has 19,000 vs your 360 then it is quite possible that they are being far more aggressive at building links then you are and may be reaping the rewards if it.

I'm a SEO newbie, but what about checking the PR of his backlinks. Could it be possible that some of his backlinks are no longer good to be associated with, or have lost their own PR thereby bring his down?