Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Another story about a site that has been trashed by Penguin/Panda. My site's been around for 10 years. It's had ups and downs but right now it is WAY down. The site is in a competitive arena but I am targetting less competitive niches within and I can confirm these are much less competitive, quite specialised and only people with relevant experience can produce content of any value. (that's not saying people can't produce abundant garbage that ranks!) According to Google there are no manual spam actions but pages that once had top 5 positions are now nowhere to be found. Pages that contain links to these once popular pages are appearing in SERPS but not the pages themselves. Or at least I've not trawled below page 50..... I'm trimming away old pages and low content pages and I'm going to start cleaning up backlinks (already got rid of a few old sitewide links but things have just got worse!). It truly is as though ex-high ranking pages are having their heads held under the water but I don't know why and I can't understand why considerably lower quality pages are ranking but mine are not. I don't overoptimise and I design pages to contain helpful content and the service people receive is also good quality (I have testimonials!) What I need is just someone to take a look and help me understand why my site has been slammed and what steps I need to take. There is no doubt the site is being held back. I've read several articles on what to do to improve things and I am working on it but I would love an expert opinion. Can anybody offer some suggestions & what would you need from me...?