Long time back, i guess i was smartprices. All i was earning was a few cents from every click that i got, on all my sites. Then about a few weeks later i got frustrated and removed the ads. I kept the ads removed for a month or so, and worked harder on the sites in terms of content and backlinks. Later when i put the ads back, every thing was normal. I think the removal of the ads for one month's time worked for me.
I honestly don't know if I've ever been smartpriced. My ePC varies day to day and also trends up and down on 7-day, 30-day, and 60-day moving averages. The only real dramatic change I've seen in the trends was actually a quick upward movement over a short period of time which would NOT be indicative of smart pricing. I've had drops short-term, but I've associated those with crap ads because when I banned a few MFAs from showing on my site, the overall ePC went up. A lot of what people ascribe to smartpricing may actually be just an infestation of poor MFA ads showing up on their site.
I think I was smart priced sometimes back with mfa ads as I got only few cents per click. I used competitive filters to block the mfa ads but newer crappy ads again crop back. The list in the filter keeps growing...
I have faced this problem and it took me 5 weeks to overcome from that . Just go as much as deep you can go into your niche what i can say . First i was reviewing softwares and when i got smartpriced than i started writing about programs used in creating all those softwares .