It does happen at a lot of times that you believe your website is quite well optimized for search engines and you see that in the results about the traffic diverted to your website, but you see a sudden drop in the rankings. Completely oblivious to the fact that it might be due to over optimization, you start searching the key components of the website:

1) The contents
2) The outbound links – if not junk and obsolete now
3) The Inbound links – if not coming from just any unwanted website
4) Insufficient or too many keywords

We would actually start to wonder that if a website is penalized for being over optimized. It still remains a myth if that might be the case because all tactics used were “white hat “ as such ant not “Black Hat” or what we call SPAM. Understanding everything is white hat we need to understand what could cause an over optimization penalty. We need to start looking at the Keyword Density.

Often, it so happens that there are too many keywords prescribed for the website, which in turn makes it look like spam. Search Engines like Google; work on the law of averages which looks at keyword density values on pages compared with overall text. Example, A keyword can appear many a times on the page, thus giving the page a higher keyword density but has relatively few over all key words, therefore showing a lesser average.

In another event, let us suppose that our page is very well linked and integrated with other pages with keywords matching and widely spread across all the pages, a very high keyword density could indicate the page is a doorway, especially created for the benefit of search engine spiders. Doorways, are not very well respected with the spider. It may as well be that they may be removed from the index entirely because of its reputation.

Therefore to conclude, we do understand that it might be possible that you are getting penalized for over optimizing it or having doorways.