As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time.

The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.

It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine.

Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.