Single word penalty?

[HitProf]

One of my clients sites seems to have run into some sort of penalty for one particular keyword. It ranks fine for keyword + (almost any other relevant word) and it ranks fine for other relevant keywords, even with more competition. Searches for "keyword", +keyword and keyword -gibrish return the same results: the site ranks 100+.

Based on my experience with other sites I know it should rank at least top 50 for this keyword, even though it's only a PR3. I can only think of some sort of penalty.

My question is: how do I get rid of this supposed penalty? A reinclusion request doesn't sound right, the site is included in the index and it ranks well for other words. We've already tempered with keyword density but it doesn't move. Who knows what to do?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Some of us in here think that Google may be applying some sort of over optimisation penalty for certain targeted keywords or phrases. This may be your problem. Does this word appear in all the SEO strategic places?

[HitProf]

Hm I might give that a try. Although none of the title, h1, etc is the an exact keyword match, it is included in them.

Any more thoughts?

[artdog]

Did it EVER rank for this one word?

[HitProf]

The highest I've seen it was 23, after it had been rising from 100+ via 50+ and 30+ and then suddenly dropped. Not sure when exactly, could have been during Bourbon even.

[rfgdxm1]

>Based on my experience with other sites I know it should rank at least top 50 for this keyword, even though it's only a PR3. I can only think of some sort of penalty.

Please, do explain why? The only way I'd expect to rank well for a single keyword with my SEO knowledge with just a PR3 (this is even less PR than common for the home pages of teenagers) is if the single keyword were extremely uncompetitive. Then again, since I can get any page on any site to PR5 trivially, it isn't like I ever had to worry about being limited by such low PR.

[fatpeter]

Try taking the keyword out of title. De-optimise that keyword but not completely. That's what I did and and it worked for me. Of course I don't know if that did it or my site just started doing better around that time as I started ranking better for everything but the only change I made was the keyword in title.

[HitProf]

PR is on it's way up, but we like to build up slowly. Still in contrast with earlier experience. It's just this word on which it refuses to rank while I expected it to do.

[tedster]

This is the kind of thing that started happening all the way back with the Florida update - here's one approach that's been helping me.

If that problematic keyword has semantic relatives that show up bold on Google's tilde search, then try using those related words on the page that you want to see rank. Also use any other semantically related words or phrases you can discover -- for instance, because they appear on many top ten pages, or because you see them on the right hand side at AskJeeves.

Lightly season your efforts with these terms in the usual assortment of on-page and off-page spots.