Google Hates BKWeddings

I know that google penalizes sites. I know that google is a huge corporation that fights spam in all sorts of directions, and that I probably fell into one of those groupings. I just have no idea how.

This is very frustrating to me and I take it personally. I know I shouldn't. I know that my efforts should be concentrated on making the site better and eventually big G will come around, and if they don't I don't really need them. The site currently fluctuates between 1000 and 3000 visitors a day without google which by most small webmaster standards is pretty good.

So what exactly has caused google to think that I am a spammer? Or that my site is such a low quality site? And what should or can I do to fix it? I have a few ideas.

First and foremost, I need to pay more attention to the site and complete some of the many projects that I have in development to improve the site's content and desirability for new visitors.

But what could have caused problems? Here are a few things that I've done historically that may have triggered something:

Digital Point Cooperative Advertising: BKWeddings has been a member of the Digital Point Cooperative advertising network since inception. I refuse to believe this had anything to do with it, but I'm laying it out for everyone to see. Many webmasters have blamed the Coop for a drop in google rankings, but I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe it is true. I have donated close to $1000 to digital point for new servers because I think that the Coop Network and other services they offer are solid tools and important for the webmaster community at large - especially the small webmaster community. Aside from the donations the advertising is free, it spans thousands of websites, it's easy to implement, and it generates traffic. Some ads have produced no significant traffic at all. Other's have been responsible for thousands of visitors. It's really a matter of how hot the link might be. There have been some less than great links on the network, but I have always had faith that Shawn over at DP will administer the network responsibly and historically he has. He's banned advertisters for sneaking in bad links, removed questionable links from the network, and improved the codebase significantly - even to the point where he has implmented the nofollow tag that I've frequently spoken out strongly against
Paid Links: There I said it. I've done it. I've paid for links. You aren't supposed to, but an entire sub-economy surrounding paid links wouldn't exist if it was not effective. I don't have a ton of money so I haven't paid for very many.
Paid Articles: I've paid for articles from less than stellar writers. Some of the content up on the site is not so hot. But I did go through an extensive editing effort after noticing that the articles were lacking. I haven't gone through all the articles on the site, but I'd be surprised if there were any that were unreadable or provided no value.
GeoTargetting YPN and Adsense: The ad service has flipped back and forth between Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Adsense. At times I've displayed Google Ads only to non-US visitors since YPN only works for US Visitors. This geo-targetting could potentially be considered cloaking, but since it's just advertisements that shift, I would think not. Also, I sometimes change the ad placement automagically to reduce ad blindness by visitors. That could be a problem too.
Long Stretches with no updates: I've been all consumed with my offline work on several occasions. During these times, BKWeddings has gone long stretches without updates. This could be a problem
Directory: I have a directory at www.bkweddings.com that began loosely based on some DMOZ results. Because it wasn't the whole of the DMOZ categories, and because many entries are not DMOZ, I opted against actually putting the standard DMOZ link in the directory footer. I know that some directories have been stripped of PR, but I always considered this a great resource on the site and never offered any paid links or even user submissions.
Overoptomized Templates: It could be that the pages themselves triggered an over-optomization flag. The templates that I built the site with are pretty clean and I was thinking of SEO when I built them
Too Many H tags: I actually didn't know this was something that google didn't like when I built the site templates, but I have seen plenty of references to this fact since. I don't know how many H tags I use in a given page, but I think I have some H2 tags in each of the side bars for subsection headings - which is entirely appropriate IMO and really how you should use them. I also am pretty sure I have H1-H4 tags on almost every page, but it really has been a long time since I ever analyzed the page structure
Blog Spam: Fighting comment spam was a losing battle for me until I finally went and disabled comments altogether until I could develop something that was more effective than any of the canned things out there.
Being a blog: Back when I built BKWeddings, I was new to the whole concept of blogging. Moveable Type offered a great templating system and publishing platform, so I used it. I then soon found out about blog and ping services like pingoat and that other one who's name I forget but everybody uses. BKWeddings isn't really a blog per se - it's more of a collection of articles, but I did notice that when google released it's blog search, bkweddings went straight to the blog search and was virtually nowhere in the regular search. The thing is - people looking for blogs don't want to read regular articles and people looking for regular articles don't end up searching in blog searches. I have a feeling I'm not the only one in this boat. I have yet to figure out what to do - do I just use MT and stop pinging? Remove all generator tags and things like that? How exactly does a site get tagged as a blog versus a regular site? I have no idea.
Duplicate Content: As I'm constructing my sitemap generator, I'm seeing web pages that should not exist that are left over from previous template releases or configuration changes that I've made to MT. I'm in the process of removing them, but this could be an issue. I also have templated links including links to articles all over the site - some templates have listings of articles that were recently published, some have listings of articles from the same categories. Some listings have subtext which could be considered duplicate content. As many spammers also use this technique from other sites to auto-generate pages, I think this might actually be a problem - but again, I think that my particular usage scenario is entirely legitimate.
Lack of Fresh Links: Any links to this site that have developed in at least the last six months are entirely organic. I haven't put an ounce of effort into marketing the site as I've been consumed in offline work.
Too many links per page: I have over 150 links on some pages because my templates include CSS based nav menus and there are a lot of internal site links in general. I wasn't so worried about link count because all of the links served a purpose, but could this have raised an automated flag?
General Site Quality: I've put a lot of hard work into the site, and I have received compliments from friends and family, but what do other people, including those who might review the site for Google think? If someone goes to the site and thinks spam than I really have gone wrong, but I'm certainly open to that possibility and learning why and how I can change things to improve them.
Repeat Visitors: The site does not get a significant percentage of repeat visitors, which sadly points out that Google not liking the site is probably the right idea. I have my own set of ideas on how to change this, and as to the root cause of the problem, but of course these are still ideas and not action at this point.