Help me solve a keyword ranking mystery please

[Freelancer13]

I posted this and had some help (thank you!) but found some new things, so I thought I'd just start a new thread so no info. is missed.

Hi everyone, I'm new here So far I've had wonderful success seo wise and none of the updates (Penguin nor Panda) affected any sites, until this one.

For example, one site has 7 keywords I'm optimizing for. Out of those 7, all but 2 (and variations of the 2 - one word vs long-tail) completely tanked. These keywords were all on page 2/3. One of the two survivors never budged from page 2 (it's a brand keyword so I was very happy to finally get it to page 2)

Now when I check rankings, the other terms show up in the 200-400 spots, but NOT for the URL I was optimizing for (category page) but instead for random products in the category.

The only thing I've done differently with the 2 keywords that are still doing well, was focus - we did more link-building for those, but not an extreme amount. Never over-optimize.

My question is, how did 2 survive and 5 are still floating up and down. Last night I saw one go up 122 spots, now today down 14. I'm really struggling with this.

I just ran another diagnostic crawl here and the report found 0 errors and 0 warnings. I checked category content with a plagiarism checker and found some external duplicate content which I've already taken care of.

No critical warnings/messages in WMT either. I'm stumped

Thank you for any help.

[PixelgemsCreative]

For those other 5 that are floating are they product related?

Maybe it would be better for your business to optimize the product pages with keywords that relate specifically to the products that page is selling.

[Freelancer13]

Yes - it's a skin care site so each category page is www.sitename/categoryname

I just don't get why 2 did well (the most competitive) and the others are MIA

[PixelgemsCreative]

Does the body content on that category page have anything to do with the 5 keywords you lost rankings for?

[Freelancer13]

Do you mean as in duplicate content or too high keyword ratio? If so, I checked for duplicate content, didn't find much off site or on, fixed what I could. All the content was originally written and added to the site months ago. Survived Panda in Oct. Nov. and Dec. so why now? It's a mystery...