SEOPanda - 11:48 pm on Dec 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

Long time listener, first time caller here :)

We have an ecommerce site that's a PR7 and about a decade old. It's very strong in it's niche, and very dominant in the rankings for just about all of it's main keywords. We pride ourselves on having a clean white hat SEO approach.

We launched a new product line a few years ago and have been working on having the main term rank. The ranking page is a PR5, has a good backlink profile, optimized just as well as the rest of the site, but it simply doesn't rank for it's intended keyword.

The keyword is extremely competitive, but we currently rank anywhere on average page 15 for this term. For a site of our authority, a page 15 ranking just doesn't make sense.

We've been doing optimization on this for the past year, and are not seeing any movement besides a few pages up and then back down... total see-saw effect. We have a backlink profile that ranges from edu sites to military sites to this page, but that doesn't seem to have made a difference.

Our site was not affected in any version of Panda.

I was thinking there might be some kind of keyword level penalty for our site. The ranking page does well for long tail, but simply doesn't for it's main term.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I've been pulling my hair out trying to diagnose this, but keep on coming up short.

Our brand + keyword is #1 BTW (if that makes a difference).

Thanks in advance for your help on my first post! :)