Hi Rand/Matt, I understand your answer but I really think there is something more there. We have developed tremendous content, our site has been up since 1998. We have good PA and DA and no sense of any type of penguin type penalty. We have in the past dominated the SERPs often at the top slots. Then as Google added "brand" consideration to the mix we've been placed more middle of the first page (some have mentioned that this might be related to a panda hit but I don't think so when I look at the quality of our site versus the quality of the sites beating us). All of our competitors have "related" classifications and those related tags are page, not site related. Interestingly, our URLs will show up from time to time on the competitors related listings. I'm not sure how long this has been going on but I'm thinking that there is some sort of manual tag (I don't think this is a penalty of any sort) that Google has attached to our domain. I truly believe that the lack of a related tag some how is reducing our SERP ranking. I'd love to find an answer to this mystery.
On a related but separate note I've noticed that some of our competitors have another type of notation that shows up right next to the related/cache arrow that references DMOZ of Wikipedia listings. While we don't have a Wikipedia listing we do have a DMOZ listing, but that is not shown by Google either. Do you have any idea how to get Google to recognize our DMOZ posting? (I realize that DMOZ in it self is really pretty useless but if Google is recognizing it as important enough to list with the URL listings for some of our competitors there must be some value there.)
Any help or insight that you can provide would be much appreciated.