we have a website that offers hotels and other accommodation, we get the information from a site that we are affiliated with. Is google starting to crack down on affiliated sites? Is that a possible reason why we've dropped down the SERPS so much or are we still suffering the June, July 27th and August 17th data refresh issues. It's killing our business...
Travel is our core business, you need to be constantly updating with new content to maintain rankings in a very competitive vertical sector
Post the site and I will take a look. Unless the site offers more content than the data that you are getting elsewhere then its likely google doesn't see it as being useful to people searching.
I think your link building is quite weak. May I know what are the things you've already done on this site since your rankings dropped? I have an affiliate sites but I didn't have any problems with them. Their rankings is steady. I think you need to do more SEO for your site such as link building.
The external link details seem very strong. The only thing I can see is that the site offers very little other than the contact details and locations of all the different hotels and guest houses. You need to find a way of adding 100% unique content and features to the site to make it more useful than the other travel sites on the market. Why not contact every hotel and guest house on the site and ask them to write a nice long review on their business so you can add it to their site.
One question to ask yourself, is were the higher results you acheived earlier on, shown across all the google DC's? Sometimes I'll see some of my sites slip in the top 10 results for big keywords, but it's not straight across all the DC's, and those type of results tend to move a lot.