Can Your Site be Penalized for One Keyword and Not Others?

[LiamP]

I set up a site recently optimized mainly for one keyword, but also for other related long tail keywords.

The long tail keywords are ranking fine. The site is being indexed regularly. The main keyword is nowhere to be seen in the rankings despite good backlinks with good anchor text being built.

The main keyword has much higher competition than the others , so initially I thought fine, it'll just take a while. Overall it's not a high competition niche though, not many people target it.

The reason I now think it MAY be being penalized for the keyword is

(a) For the first two weeks the site may have been over-optimized for the main keyword. It was at about 11% keyword density. I took it back to about 4-5% a month ago.
(b) My site is not showing up at all in Google alerts for the main keyword. The long tail ones are showing up in Google alerts though. All kinds of crappy sites mentioning my main keyword in passing show up in Google alerts.

Am I being impatient and paranoid , is there something I've missed or could Google be penalizing me on that keyword for a time? If so how long would such a penalty last?

[paulgl]

Google thinks different than you. They think your site is best suited
for other keywords. There are some things you can do, but what do
I do? I go with the flow and max what they give. I tried fighting,
but reasoned, why? If google ranks my site for a decently searched term,
why not maximize that?

I gave up fighting with google a long time ago. You can , over time,
try for the "real" keyword, but it may be a futile attempt. The
competition might be overbearing.

If google thinks about penalizing a site, it usually means a de-index.

Don't mistake "not liking as much as you think" to penalizing.

Most webmasters are responsible for digging their own graves, not
google.

Paul

[LiamP]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Google thinks different than you. They think your site is best suited
for other keywords. There are some things you can do, but what do
I do? I go with the flow and max what they give. I tried fighting,
but reasoned, why? If google ranks my site for a decently searched term,
why not maximize that?

I gave up fighting with google a long time ago. You can , over time,
try for the "real" keyword, but it may be a futile attempt. The
competition might be overbearing.

If google thinks about penalizing a site, it usually means a de-index.

Don't mistake "not liking as much as you think" to penalizing.

Most webmasters are responsible for digging their own graves, not
google.

Paul

Thanks for the insight Paul. As you say if Google sees a site as relevant to "knitting needles" but not "knitting" at the end of the day there may not be anything I can do.

What's frustrating is seeing pr0 spam sites completely unrelated to "knitting" mention knitting in the middle of a paragraph and show up on Alerts but not my post titled 'Knitting needles - 50 nifty tricks'.

I'm was hoping it was a known penalty as that could mean it was something that could be fixed over time.

Anyways there are other irons in the fire

Note 'knitting' is a random example chosen to hide the fact that my real keyword is 'dog walking'