Recovery from keyword stuffing - Penguin?

[yahalimu]

Hello.
Our site ranked about 3rd for a particular search term last few years, careful white hat link building, one or two old forum sigs that must be dead by now.
Front page was maybe 'over optimised' for this keyword in terms of keyword frequency but it didn't seem to affect us though.
Recently we have had a new direct competitor spring up, now ranking very well. I have observed a lot of link building by them over last year.
Suddenly our front page disappeared for that search term, but IS still indexed. No other keywords have been affected. Another sub-page still ranks for that term, as it has always, at about 8th and it is still there. (We had two results for that term)
I suspected a Google website report for keyword stuffing, so I have now rectified that and have re-written the front page. Or maybe a penguin attack? Was about 2 months ago.
The link quality is OK as ONLY that search term has been affected and I have used a common technique for all search terms.
Am I safe to assume all this? I don't need a reconsideration request, I think, cos only that search term is affected on the front page. Do I just now wait for Google to re-list or does a keyword stuffing report need a request? Any idea how long this will take?


Any comments (constructive) appreciated.

[tedster]

In my experience, Penguin does not completely "vanish" a URL, but it can bury them pretty deep. Have you looked thoroughly through the SERPs? If you can't find your URL at all, then I don't think it's Penguin.

[yahalimu]

Thanks tedster.
Yes its lurking at around position 580, slid there around early Januray time, and was a slide, took about a week to fall off 1st page, then slid more rapidly.

[helenp]

In my experience, Penguin does not completely "vanish" a URL, but it can bury them pretty deep. Have you looked thoroughly through the SERPs? If you can't find your URL at all, then I don't think it's Penguin.

Does Penguin "penalize" a particular search query but not others?

Sorry for "steeling" the post, but have a similar problem as yahalimu however has not fallen that much.

An exampel,
I am in co.uk searching for mycity/apartments on first page, well placed, but for mycity/villas on the fifth page.
Both words are in title and on page, villas appears more times than apartments due to it is the same in other languages as well on site.
I have tried to do changes in the title without no luck.

[diberry]

Does Penguin "penalize" a particular search query but not others?

It seemed to in my case - certain queries and certain words within queries. Of course, it can be hard to determine which of the eleventy billion "quality updates" Google makes each week is "the one" that had a certain effect you're observing. I've made a lot of other non-Penguin-related changes on my Penguinized site since Penguin, and Google hasn't reacted well to all of them (and I don't care).

[tedster]

Panda definitely was keyword based, but I'm not 100% sure about Penguin. Odds are Penguin is too, I'd say, since Google seemed quite happy with that approach in Panda. After all, Penguin is trying to demote artificially boosted rankings - and rankings means keywords.