Zivush - 5:43 am on Mar 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

It completely sucked to "down grade" the pages, but that's what I had to do to increase rankings for those pages based on the algo today, so that's what I did.

Interesting. I worked on the complete opposite direction.
When I make changes, instead of thinking of the algo and what it might cause to the ranking, I improved pages just for the sake of improving them.
The first time I did it (307 pages), the traffic went up by 12k visits per day.
The second time (another 150 pages), too early to tell if there's any traffic change.
Now, I am on the process of improving another 60 pages.
Frankly, I hesitate every time I make changes. It's Risky. But what makes me doing improvement is the face of the site in front of the users (and potential buyers).
I can't expect Google algo machine to rank everything I think is better.