Is this a penalty?

[Tonearm]

A few phrases I should be within the top 20 for, I'm between 60 and 90. Could that be a penalty? How can I look into this further?

[tedster]

First, check into the penalty discussions in our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

Once in a while, you may also have a message in your Webmaster Tools account - that's worth a look, too. But most of the time, Google is not going to say that you have a penalty.

[tedster]

Let me add something about the "I should be..." idea. Have you ever ranked there?

[asinah]

a good point tedster. If a site ranked for a long time on a keyword and then drops, it could be a penalty.

[Tonearm]

I went through the Hot Topics for penalty discussions, but wasn't able to turn up much. There are discussions of penalty-related issues (when to file a reconsideration request, spam links, position #6 bug, duplicate content), but I didn't find anything I could use.

I suppose my real question is, why am I ranking so low for certain terms that I'm targeting?

My site is nearly 10 years old and highly optimized with 100% "white hat" techniques. Each page has a main target phrase. I rank in the top 4 or 5 (or higher) for many of these phrases.

Going through the "Top search queries" in Webmaster Tools with "Web Search" and "United States" selected, the top 3 listed terms (which I should rank very well for) are listed as 5, 5, and 6. My actual placement is close to 70, 90, and 80. I'm not sure if I've actually ranked in the 5, 5, 6 range in the past.

I recently read about a penalty that can be applied for too many anchor text keywords. What does that penalty look like? Are there others I could run into without using any "black hat" techniques?

[tedster]

For a long time, the penalty that kicked in when the same word appeared in a lot of different anchors was the so-called -950 penalty. Today it is often not that drastic, but the sign is that those over-optimized keywords rank a lot lower than you expect - or than they used to.

You can also have trouble ranking well if your text is all focused on the keywords you are targeting rather than containing a natural amount of expected co-occurring words. Said another way, a page about apples would naturally contain at least some of "orchard, tree, delicious, red, green, cider, produce, fruit" plus longer phrases like "fruit pie recipes" or whatever, and not just hammer away on "apples, apples, apples, apples, apples."

[Tonearm]

Nice, thanks tedster. Very nice description at the end there.

[pavlovapete]

You may wish to check this:
Phrase Based Multiple Indexing and Keyword Co-Occurrence [webmasterworld.com]

[Tonearm]

A couple more questions on this.

If I have been subject to a penalty (e.g. too much keyword anchor text), is there anything I can do now that I've fixed the problem? Does a re-inclusion request apply here?

What about keyword anchor text in links to individual products? It really needs to be "Red Widget" and not "Red". Is there any way to avoid a penalty there?

[Tonearm]

Also I'm in position 12, 14, 14 for these terms in Bing. I'm in the 80s for all of these on Google. That really points to a Google penalty to me.

[tangor]

Follow the link I posted here for some interesting reading on Google Penalties and how to get Google to whitelist your site...

[webmasterworld.com...]