This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.
As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:
We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"
This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.
Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"
This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.
All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.
So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.
It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?
Okay thanks all