Rankings dropping after small URL-change WITH 301-redirect

[rmvw]

This post is deleted!

[SEO5Team]

David, you might have received an over optimization penalty by Google. They have been penalizing a lot of sites for excessive optimization of on site elements like title tags, header tags etc.

Rand did a really good whiteboard session on this topic

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Barry also covered it in a good post along with a couple of presentations on this topic

http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google’s-working-on-an-“over-optimization”-penalty-for-that-115627

I suggest removing the excessive optimization on the pages and waiting for Google to reindex the pages. You should be able to recover your rankings over time.

[rmvw]

Thanks for your answer.

Does an over-optimization penalty normally affects all rankings or only the rankings of those keywords, you over-optimized for?

In our case, rankings for all the other keywords stayed the same or even improved during this time.