Keyword ranking not moving

[steven1133]

Hello,

We have a very important keyword for our website (www.decorplanet.com) that hasn't moved in any direction in over a year. The keyword is "bathroom vanities". Our current SEO company has told us that the previous company has "over- optimized/linked" for this particular keyword and now Google is penalizing us for this. They told us that we need to leave it alone for a while and concentrate on other keywords and this one should naturally come back up (I should mention that at some point, we were much higher than where we are right now for that particular keyword).

Many of our other high-profile keywords have been moving nicely to the first page. Keywords like "modern bathroom vanities", "antique bathroom vanities", "contemporary bathroom vanities", but the one that we really want ("bathroom vanities") hasn't budged at all.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this. Is it possible that Google put us in some sort of a "sand-box" - I mean we are on page 2 so it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's just very bizarre that we can't seem to do anything with this keyword.

Really appreciate any thoughts or input on this.

[MentorMate]

From your explanation it doesn't seem to make any sense that you would be punished for "bathroom vanities" but you are simultaneously increasing your rank for partial exact match longtail variations of that core phrase. It's possible that they manually punished you for that phrase specifically, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. As long as you are growing your links focused around that core phrase in an organic fashion Google should not punish you further for this. I don't see a reason to hold off on it assuming your efforts are within Google's guidelines. I'd recommend some sort of linkbaiting scheme for "bathroom vanities" - an infographic perhaps.