Hello folks,
I have a problem with optimizing a page for 2 different keywords. Here is the situation:
On-page: Both keywords in title; both words in body text (I didn't count them but approximately 3-4 times for 100 words in total)
Off-page: Exact anchor text from article directories, Synonym & Brand anchors from directories. My link building shcedule is as inconsistent as possible. I just keep around 50 links per week. I do social sharing, guest blogging with exact/synonym anchor text links and also I link to other pages across the whole site. I try to avoid site bar and footer links although I have some because it's partner links, I didn't buy them. I even asked web masters to put nofollow tag to those link after the drop because I was concerned that Penguin considers them bought links.
The result: 1st keyword is going quite well, it reached 5th postion but after that dropped to the second page, which more or less I can explain with various factors such as overal keyword competition, maybe penguin thought that some links are spammy.
The problem is that the second keyword is disaster. I found it in SERP after 1 month hard work on 17th page and now it is swinging between 14th and 17th page. Honestly, I am confused. Is it possible that link building with 2 keywords to the same page creates self canibalization of some kind?
Just to remind that the 2 keywords are quite different, i,e. there are not related as synonyms or similar. Do you guys have had similar problem?
Thanks in advance for your advice