Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm curious to know your site and the competitor in question.

I, like you, feel like I've been running into walls and wondering how they got in the road.

check out this thread and let me know if you think it's relevant to your situation:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/aged-sites-or-5-year-old-seo

Hi Paul, I took a quick look at the OSE for your site and your competitor. It seems to me that we are both running into a similar issue. How old is your site? When did SEO work on your site begin?

Your competitor has forum posts from 2009 here: http://www.thephotoforum.com/

Have you considered joining and posting on this forum?
Perhaps there's another one that you could join as well?

check out this thread that I started for where I'm coming from.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/aged-sites-or-5-year-old-seo

When I first signed up for pro, I wasn't able to take advantage as I got pretty busy.

This time around, I devoted some time to setting up my campaign.

In the six weeks I've been back, I've corrected multiple errors on my site as a result of the weekly crawl.
And I've seen my rankings rise even with the tumultuous times the SERPs are undergoing.

I was actually just coming on the forum to find a place to share this as I have seen real results from my efforts, the weekly crawls, the reports which I can translate into direct changes on my site, this forum, the blogs, etc

When I first signed up for pro, I wasn't able to take advantage as I got pretty busy.

This time around, I devoted some time to setting up my campaign.

In the six weeks I've been back, I've corrected multiple errors on my site as a result of the weekly crawl.
And I've seen my rankings rise even with the tumultuous times the SERPs are undergoing.

I was actually just coming on the forum to find a place to share this as I have seen real results from my efforts, the weekly crawls, the reports which I can translate into direct changes on my site, this forum, the blogs, etc