Negatives outweighing Positives?

negative and positive factors for ranking in google

[sunzon]

Noticing a lot of reranking of my pages today after recent robot visits, back up to page 1 after falling to page 4-5 or worse in december. I panicked in december and did of lot of rethinking and what I did seems to have helped (unless google is reverting to an old index, can't tell).
My rethinking led me to concentrate on diminishing negatives, I believed my positives were pretty much well exploited (key density, H1, title, keywords in links etc). The negatives I worked on were:
** removing (or blocking indexing) of affiliate links
** decreasing page size
** decreasing number of links on a page (certainly to no more than 100)
** decreasing non-theme-relevant links
** decreasing deeplinking to no more than 3 levels
I am not including spam techniques (by definition negatives from G's viewpoint) because I don't use them.

Maybe this has been effective. It's human nature to concentrate on positives (what gets me well placed), it is less natural to concentrate on negatives (what badly affects my placement).

Recently G algo changes seem to be concentrating on improving serps by concentrating more on negatives, not positives. The importance of PR is a case in point. What I mean is not concentrating on showing best relevancy/quality sites at the top because of favourable keywords, keyword presentation and PR (after all there is only a little bit of room on the first 3 pages that matter and there are only 10 numbers in the PR) and let the rest trail behind, but getting rid of trash, duplicates and non-relevants particularly in those first few pages. That includes G efforts to diminish affiliate listings (all duplicates by definition), ffa link pages, directory links-no-new-content pages, let alone pur sang spammers, even though some of those efforts backfire since the methods used are fallible. At the end of the day, G is not really trying to show the "best"(?!) sites at the top for a given keyword search often giving 2 thousand to 2 million results, but concentrates on not ranking highly sites that shouldn't (?!) be at the top.

We are all trying to make a buck, having the visitor on our page means we tend to overdo getting benefit from that presence (so we link too much.....in case they are maybe interested in another version?....another product?......., talk too much (as advertisiers do, first you tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you've told), please bookmark (come back again won't you?), optin email newsletters, feature our best earning links above the fold/at the top, and so on. That remark about "what advertisers do" is a positive for serps ranking too (keyword density). Maybe another identification of negatives is the positive rule: "keep it simple".

In a nutshell: Whilst we are concentrating on positives to get ranked well, maybe G is concentrating on negatives to rank certain sites lower.
Just food for thought, so my call for comment is, could negatives be impacting ranking more than positives?