brinked - 9:46 pm on Apr 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

Say that there is Keyword/Phrase over usage in the body text but not in the other parts of a page. Could adding more content to the body text so that there is no over usage afterwards help in the rankings?

Adding more content to dilute the over usage of your terms. You can also remove some of the keyword instances from your existing text and other places of the page. A lot of people are hesitant to do this because they feel "oh no if I remove my prize term from my page I will lose rankings". That is not the case at all. I have had a saying for the last 3-4 years now and its "De-optimization is the new optimization" and that is starting to hold true more so today than ever before.

Great post Brinked. I am wondering if any penalties associated with unnatural links that were algorithmically applied will be removed algorithmically without ever sending a reconsideration request (once those links have been deleted). I'm also taking a look at my internal link structure and anchor text; but, I have learned to make on-site changes (especially navigational changes) very gradually and methodically.

I have been in this situation at least a dozen times for myself, not even counting clients I have worked with. Everytime I removed backlinks, I recovered. Now there were a few instances where I didn't recover, but it turned out to be an on site issue, nothing to do with links.

I remember when I was new and still learning SEO, I signed up to one of them text link networks that placed massive amounts of backlinks for you and it was really cheap. I used this and was dropped a week after. I finally just removed the backlinks and I kid you not, 2 days after my rankings were restored.

I do have a lot of keyword usage on my pages. The most obvious is probably anchor text because I have up to 30 links on many of my pages such as "Red Widgets, Circular Widgets, Furry Widgets, etc". Should I do nothing, remove the links from "Widgets" only, or remove the links from all of the text and leave only the image linked? I would hate to de-optimize and end up worse off. How can I tell if a minor over-optimization penalty is affecting my site?

That sounds like a redundancy issue. What I like to do for a list of links such as this is put a header bar labeled "Widgets". This way, all items listed under that bar will be types of widgets, something every user will be able to understand.

This way you can remove the word widget from each link and still be useful to your users, and probably google as well. This method is also much more efficient as well.