Over Optimization Penalty? Wrong Page Ranking For Keyword

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I wonder if one of my pages might be have an over optimization penalty, and hope you might have ideas on how to determine if I do, and what the best method of correcting it might be.

The Situation:

An Example: I am trying to rank for the keywords "widget photos"

my domain name is: thewidgetpanorama . com/ and it is about 16 months old.

I want my page /widget-photos.html to rank for the "widget photos" keywords. However, it does NOT appear in the first 300 search results in google

my page /widget-images.html currently ranks around 59th in the serps

My widget-photos.html page is linked to directly from the home page. The widget-images.html page is NOT. In fact, it is only linked to from the widget-photos.html page.

The title text of my widget-photos.html page is: Widget Photos and Images: Reproductions of Widget Pictures

The title text of my widget-images.html page is: Widget Images

my widget-photos.html contains not only about a dozen products, but a pretty extensive unique history of widget photography

The Plot Thickens...

While this site is 16 months old, it was "in competition" with another site of mine, which had similar material (but different enough to hopefully not get a duplicate content penalty).

On February 18th, I took all the widget images material off the old site and 301 redirected it to the most relevant pages on the new site.

The home page of the OLD site (which DID have the words widget photos in the title) ranks 48th for the keyword widget photos (it was ranking around 16th with an indented listing to its widget-photos.html page back in mid February when I moved the content to the new site, and back in the day, it ranked in the top 5 many years ago).

The old site has a link on the home page in the first paragraph of text to the widget-photos.html page of the new site. The anchor text is widget photos

the widget-photos.html page of the old site has been 301 redirected to the widget-photos.html page of the new site.

And Google Says...

Google analytics tells me that the widget-photos.html page of the new site is the most popular page on my site, but the keywords people are using to find it are things like "widget photos history" or "widget photos techniques" " or "meaning of widget photos" - basically, NOT money making keywords.

Immediately after 301 redirecting the old widget-photos.html page to the new site's widget-photos.html page, the new site's widget-photos.html page's traffic quadrupled.

Within three days though, it was down to only being double the traffic it had previously got. (I guess that it took google about three days to "index" the 301 redirect, which is when the traffic dropped from about quadruple to just double.)

Link Profile:

I don't have many links. Like maybe 20 (mostly reciprocals) to the home page - none to the widget-photos.html page, and none to the widget-images.html page. I do have about 25 to a different section of my site that is unrelated to widget photography (so different, in fact, that I will probably be breaking it off to another site in the next 6 months or so).

Any suggestions on how to analyze this or what direction to move forward would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[aristotle]

So if there is a penalty, it has to be specifically for the two word phrase "widget photos" only, but not for any phrase with other words prepended or appended.

I think that's a good indicator of an over-optimization penalty. So the idea of de-optimizing by adding more distantly-related content makes sense. As Tedster suggested: "use a wider vocabulary that fit naturally with the topic."

[Planet13]

Thank you again, tedster and aristotle. I will keep you update if there are any ranking changes.

[Planet13]

For whatever reason, for today I am ranking on page three (number 34) of the SERPs for the desired keyword phrase (widget photos) and for the desired page (/widget-photos.html)

I haven't done anything internal to the page. However, I did...

1) Remove some 301 redirects from a different domain where the original page may have been too different from the current page...

2) Remove the noindex,follow tag from the homepage that I had accidentally put in there six weeks ago (although that home page has yet to be reindexed).

3) Maybe gotten a few more relevant links to the home page (at most, 2) and about 5 more FaceBook likes to the home page (which, as mentioned above, had been noindexed since late February and is still not itself showing in the google serps).

4) cleaned up a few broken links on the site that were NOT on the page that was having difficulty ranking.

we will see how it goes for a while and then reconsider how to better refocus the on-page content.

BTW: When looking through the SERPs again, it amazes me how spammy the first 6 or 7 sites are that appear for this keyword phrase, and how several of their other pages appear on pages 2 and 3 of the SERPs as well. They ARE on topic, but the titles are keyword stuffed and their links are either paid, from general directories, or reciprocal to off topic sites.

It saddens me to see that google still values this, but at the same time, I think that by concentrating on quality content and quality link building, I have a pretty good chance of cracking the top 3.

[tedster]

I know I'm being a bit of a nitpick here - but a #34 ranking is actually on page four, not page three. Just so all communications are lined up and all that.

[SanDiegoFreelance]

I am wondering if the "over optimization" line has moved? Specifically I was well optimized for a competitive term that does not produce well. I began de-optimizing that term and have moved up not down.

The page content changes regularly so I may have been distracted ... did you see that squire? ... It is possible but I tend to keep note of optimizations and remain consistent regardless of distractions from squires and things that go bump in the night.

[Planet13]

@tedster

I know I'm being a bit of a nitpick here - but a #34 ranking is actually on page four, not page three.

Thank You, Tedster! You just helped my site instantly move up 10 spaces in the google SERPS! I am indeed on page 3 and ranking #24 (not #34). Hooray!

Thank you again for giving me the "Tedster Bump" and moving my site up 10 spaces in google automatically ;)

P.S. I am a graduate of the California Public Education System, in case you are wondering about where my math skills come from...