Penguin Maybe? Ranking low for main term: Trying to find cause and correct

[BobGW]

Hello,

For

nlpca(dot)com

one of our main keywords is the term "NLP"

We are ranking 25th for that term.Possible causes:

1. keyword stuffing on home page, though we need to use the term over and over again to describe ourselves. Also, competitors like nlpco(dot)com and nlpu(dot)com also mention "NLP" a lot

2. Backlink profile: see this spreadsheet. We have a lot of sites from other countries and many sitewides but all natural and almost all branded. Ou company names are NLP Institute of California, NLP California, and NLP and Coaching Institute.

3. nlpcacoach(dot)org is a sitewide footer link. So is iepdoc.nl. We're going to ask the first site to take our link down.

4. No "What is NLP" article. I think that might help.

5. Most of our 60 articles are posted on other sites. We author about 30 of them. I'm working on authorship via rel="author" and rel="me" links. There's usually 2 authors

6. Most of the title tags used to be 4 keywords separated by pipes -"|" I changed them all after the updates took the keyword "NLP" down.

That's about all I can think of. What do we do or clean up?

[MichaelC-15022]

First off, if you're diagnosing a Penguin or Panda (or any Google algo) related problem, start by installing Chartelligence on Chrome.  Now, whne you log in to Google Analytics and look at traffic, this plugin will let you overlay the Google algo change dates overtop your traffic chart.  This is a HUGE help at spotting which algo hit you.

I doubt keyword stuffing on the page is the problem.  You have to get REALLY nuts with that to get in trouble, honestly.

Sitewide links will get you in trouble, though.  Get those removed, and then give it a month or two.