Site ranking hurting for "WIDGET" Keyword?

how to come out of penalty?

[dupac]

Our website is being penalized for the word "widget", which happens to be our industry keyword :(
How do I know it?

Lets say my website is www.mysitename.com and our industry main keyword is "mywidgets". My other site name is www.myothersitename.com. My competitiors site names are www.mycompetitors.com

mysitename.com is 100 times better than myothersitename interms of links, ranking for last 2 years. Thats our main site. I made www.myothersitename.com like couple of years ago and after 2002 florida it took a hit so I stopped working on that.

If I go to google and type in
---> mysitename mywidgets ----
www.mysitename.com desn't appear on top, as a matter of fact it ranks 230.
If I do "myothersitename mywidgets" then myothersitename ranks 1st and the same go with "mycompetitors mywidgets"

So I know there is penalty on my site for the word mywidgets. If there any way to come out of penalty?
This whole thing started after december changes were done.

[is300]

i have about 50 different brands I sell on my website - many rank in the top 20, except for one that is nowhere. It has been alternating from #8 to #2 to #100 now for the last month and I have no idea what I need to do. It's a correctly optimized keyword for my site and since my other pages rank well I'm curious why this one is causing headaches.