Weird, no backlink page ranking

I am seeing this happen a lot. I am also seeing irrelevant, poor quality sites ranking high in the SERPs for fairly competitive (and certainly financially lucrative) search phrases due to Penguin penalising relevant, good quality sites.

I see the pattern you mention:

I see the same thing. However, I also see it happening with keywords that have high PR pages ranking and that are fairly competitive.

What you need to ask yourself is: "Is my site highly relevant to the keyword in question?"

Many sites that are displaying similar characteristics in the SERPs for specific search terms (losing a target page for an internal page) have a very similar backlink profile as the one you mention - spammy, over-optimised for keyword or over-optimised for brand but are very relevant to those search terms.

On 1 particular site I monitor the main landing page disappeared - most probably due to a penguin penalty as it was over optimised for it's URL.

However, almost immediately an internal page appeared in the SERPs for the target keyword (albeit in a lower position but still highly visible). This internal page had NO backlinks at all but it maintained its position for months - it eventually moved up slightly when I pointed a few backlinks at it.

I believe that Google felt the main landing page had too many spam links and was over-optimised for branding and it therefore needed to be punished. So they penalised it. BUT because the site is highly relevant to the keyword and has very good user engagement Google decided it is still in the best interest of users to show a page from the site.

Personally I think this is the wrong thing to do but who am I? Google in their wisdom have decided to punish sites with what they deem as bad quality backlink profiles and IMO I think most of us that are on the Internet all day long can see that the SERPs are suffering as a result.

A good takeaway from this is that these SERP anomalies seem to confirm that Penguin is page specific and not site-wide. Thank god for some small mercies :p

My advice is to point some fairly decent links (Tier 1) at the new ranking page (like Web 2.0 or Wiki contextual links embedded in relevant content) on a 40% keyword, 40% brand (URL) and 20% generic and see what happens.

If this has a positive effect (which I believe it will) then you can blast out some lower quality backlinks pointing at those Tier 1 sites and you should see a fairly high movement in the SERPs for your new page.