Site ranking very well but not for 2 main keywords, Why?

[asher02]

Hello,

This kinda bugs me for quite a while, One of my sites is ranking extremely well in Google and shows up in top 1-5 for most of our keywords.

The history for this site is not so calm as a few years ago it lost all of its ranking and couldn't be found for 2 years or so. It gained its ranking back after Google took off some outdated penalties (according to MC).

Anyway to make long things short this site is ranking very well for every keyword but not for 2 of its main keywords.

The pages from my site that do rank for these keywords are in my opinion "the second best"

I'm not sure what went wrong and why Google refuses to show the best page for that query, I guess I'm carrying and old penalty of some sort for excessive use of these keywords as anchor in inbound links (The name of the website starts with that keyword) but was wondering if anyone had this issue and was able to get out of it or have an idea where to start looking.

[asher02]

P.S

I forgot to mention that once in awhile the right page for the query will popup from no where and will show on position 2-3 on the serps, usually it will disappear after a few hours and the second best page will show on 80-90

[tedster]

once in awhile the right page for the query will popup from no where and will show on position 2-3 on the serps

That can be a very hopeful sign - as long as your rankinga haven't been blinking on and off like that for half a year or something. How long since the outdated penalties were released?

[Yellow_Sun]

Sounds like it could be one of a few things for the keywords; over-optimized, ultra competitive keyword(s), continued penalty issues.

Seems like it easily could be 1 or more of those 3 things.

Over-optimized, yes, you might have in-bound link issues. Maybe too many in-bound links with the same keywords and from poor quality sites? Just mix up the variations of your targeted keywords and maybe even get rid of any toxic links you feel might be hurting you.

Ultra competitive keywords, are the targeted keywords too competitive to rank for? Have you ranked in the past for these keywords? Are you ranking at all for them now consistently? Or, are they just popping up from time to time? As you know, some keywords are just too difficult/competitive to rank for.

Continued penalty issues, maybe you are still having some penalty type issues for over-optimizing/bad in-links, etc. Did you ever send in a reconsideration request?

Always can be tough sometimes to pin point the exact issue, but maybe this is a small start.

[freejung]

I've seen this too, but I'm not sure what causes it. In my case it typically resolves itself after a few weeks without me doing anything, so I don't know what to recommend -- maybe improvements in backlink profile? Usually it seems to be associated with a sudden increase in rank for a high-volume keyword.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Get sitelink status(horde PR on category pages, reduce interlinking between articles) and slap those keywords into the title of your index page. When you check your sitelink status, if you are de-ranked for those terms, the words will be missing when you do an exact match search.

When you see it file a reconsideration request for those words and mention the very odd looking sitelink google has for your site.

When the words show up again return the interlinking and page title to normal and you should be clear of the penalty.

Of course since I'm writing this it would be nothing for Google to review and fix missing penalized words in sitelinks to make them show despite being de-indexed in terms of rank. Then you wouldn't be able to have the smoking gun odd looking sitelink.

note: if you used generic dictionary words in your index page title don't bother trying this, you will likely never get sitelink status for a generic term, they seem to be google protected.

[asher02]

The situation I'm describing is not new, its been like that for 1-1.5 years. The missing page is my index page which should be rank for these 2 main keywords.

For other main keywords my index page ranks in top 5 with no problem, even for more competitive keywords.

The phenomena I see is that Google for some reason takes off my index page off the serps just for these 2 keywords.

When digging into my inbound link profile, I found a website that has our link as footer using "mainkeyword1 blabla - mainkeyword2" as anchor.In total it looks like I have a few hundreds link from this site.

<SARCASM>This freaks me out, is it that simple to hurt a site?
Build a site, point a few hundred links to your competitor with your main keywords as anchor and take him off? </SARCASM>