This certainly does happen; specific words and phrases can be treated independently. At this point, our -950 penalty thread [webmasterworld.com] has be running since January - and that's a lot of dicussion! - but what you describe is something that gets discussed in that thread.

crap :/

how can i fix these penalised kyewords?

There's no one way, Jessica. The penalty can apparently be triggered by any number of things. I know there's a lot of material in there, but there's nothing for it except to start reading. You'll see some signs of hope - people seeing this kind of extreme penalty go away. But there really is no precise "step 1, step 2" that guarantees a fix in every situation.

I wonder how big your website is - if it is ranking high for just one keyword, do I get it right that it has only a few pages and just a handful of backlinks. Decent websites grow their traffic by having hundreds of pages which can result in thousands of keywords for which you will start to rank. So add more articles and eventually you will realize that building a website is more about creating great content rather than ranking for keywords.

how can i fix these penalised kyewords?

Penalized?
Fix...?

Have you ever ranked for them?

...

generic rant coming up

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Fixing phrase-related/relevancy related "penaties"
( -950 aka it's not a penalty but where you should be )
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Build a site that's relevant*.

* = on topic. not made for adsense. worded properly. written by someone who knows the topic, uses phrases known to be connected to the theme. with natural writing skills. not peeking on adwords competition and writing an article on everything that's semantically related.

With original** content that's relevant.

** = oringinal meaning... yours. Not content that's copy-pasted from various authority pages, not content rearranged for 'comparison', not content reworded from a news/official product site, not content shuffled only to escape penalties, not content recycled on each page with 3 words of difference, not just mirror writing / turned upside down... etc. No, stuff that's ***yours***. The kind of content which you'd be offended as hell to see copied onto someone else's site. Things that make it easy to...

Attract, arrange links*** that are relevant.

Have a text-based navigation that's relevant.

...

These *cough* 'penalties' are there to sweep the SERPs clean of pages that stink SEO-ONLY from a mile away. Things that lack any reaction/opinion from the same-sector players and users interested in that stuff... in other words, which lack any human touch in both their on and off-site elements. Don't you get it? It's using human data, editorial decisions, user behaviour, offline information and the analysis of markets and natural language. It took Google and the rest of the world a few dozen years to create... do you think an average SEO ( who unlike tedster isn't always good at maths ) will find the key to reverse engineer how Google reverse engineers HUMAN language and behaviour?

Ok, here's a clue:

Why try imitating a human made - human approved - human used website when you are actually in the best position to create one... as a human being? ( a.: Oh, I didn't know, I'll do that then. b.: Because in reality I don't know jack about what I'm trying to create an affiliate/adsense website for. )

...

Gee... -950 has evolved into something pretty. ( You actually need to create good content, attract and appeal to visitors to escape it... whoa! ) It's the greatest SEO repellent since TrustRank ( and the sandbox effect that came with it ).

*** = SEOs should try to understand this: you just can't get away with trying to bypass *people* whose *opinion* on your *services/products/information* should be deciding your success ( opinion means relevant/quality/editorial/trusted/comunity links to it, recommendations in any other way, recognition of your brand - ie. CTR ) . Not while marketing your website online. Users, media, editors, authorities, communities... SEO is not an *alternative* to pleasing them.

And no, I didn't mean editors of generic noname directories, and the international blogspam army. They aren't a part of the equation. And I meant that literally.

The SEO pyramid game is already collapsing in some major areas , leaving only the pillars that really were of value. ( Perhaps smaller niches will follow. ) I applaud Google for inventing this system... though they still badly need to finetune some areas. I for one vote for SEOs becoming more of accessibility, usability, net marketing specialist webmasters... rather than Search Engine Opportunists.

...

...or was this a whishlist?
I'm already seeing the effects in the most competitive sectors.

...

To anyone who actually read this: if you intended to, don't take this personally.
Check your link profile instead.
... uh, well, you *can* do SEO for the sake of SEO, but do it with/for good, original, quality content.

Which is my advice for the site mentioned in the OP.
I wonder what it looks like. *grin*

Interesting thing happened today. Have a site with 60k pages, gray hat, i.e. good domain and #*$!ty links.

We have a penalty on some keywords and some not. First time I have ever seen this. Either it is an outright penalty -30 -950 etc or a ban with site:domain.com brings up no results.

I am happy that some keywords are still there but on the other hand I need to buld a new site for the penalised ones.

So if what I read above is correct sometimes they come back and sometimes they do not?

I am not really one to site around to watch paint dry, so another question anyone else seen some sort of impending page rank up date or something that could makes the SERPS go crazy? I expect not.

Bump this one as I had a thought.

If a domain survives, as it has, but some urls do not the domain still has trust. In theory I should be able to move the content to new urls and bung links.

So interesting experiment and will post if I remember.