Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword

[joshuakrafchin]

Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction.

For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while.

Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing.

Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank.

Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank.

I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail.

I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff.

What am I not seeing?

Thank you!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

The fact that its for 1 keyword and 1 page leads me to believe that it is penguin. The refresh came on Oct 5th but could be related. Doesn't look like it has any problems with its backlinks so that leaves on page. I ran some keyword density analysis on the site and you have very high percentages for your content.

I don't usually recommend this but you should try decreasing the number of instances of your target keyword. Not by much (3 or 4 instances) but just replace several instances of "sex addition" in your body content to some synonym/different variation e.g. "addiction to sex", "the addiction", etc.

If you decide to take my advice, PLEASE let me know if it worked. This is a really interesting case

Edit: ran copyscape and see a bunch of results. I know that you are trying to quote a respected source but maybe G is taking offense to that? Although it generally shouldn't penalize you for quoting a small portion of your pages content, G could be treating this differently for one reason or another.

[joshuakrafchin]

Thanks, Oleg. I tried out your recs, but ranking has deteriorated even further ...

Organic traffic overall is fine, but this KW (and some other geo-local long tail terms) just keep falling in rank...

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Interesting... what are the other urls/keywords that have been affected? Maybe we can find a pattern.

I wonder if its a language filter causing this...

[joshuakrafchin]

The other big one is "sex therapy la" from centerforheatlhysex.com/sex-therapy.

Thanks!