Penalized for over-optimisation - help me!!!

I'm pretty sure my site has been penalized by google for being overly optimised. The site is 6 months old. Although I retain Page Rank (of 4), actual rankings are very poor in google for regular searches. However Google searches for:

allintext: my keywords
allintitle: my keywords
allinanchor: my keywords

Give very good results for my site, for various keyword phrases.

When I recently got a whole load more of keyword rich inbound links to my site, rankings actually dropped even further. Assuming these site-wide penalties are for being overly optimised (aka Florida update), what can I do to get decent rankings? De-optimise the site? Reduce keyword density? But it's not like I've spammed the search engines with the keywords.

Any advice would be welcome. I'm doing charity work here and it's not paying off. The site is http://www.piedrablanca.org - target keywords include "ecotourism Ecuador" and "adventure travel Ecuador"

post your url in this thread - it will be hard for anyone to help you without it.

allintext: my keywords
allintitle: my keywords
allinanchor: my keywords

This is something I see with all my new sites as well. You just need to be patient. You probably haven't been penalized. There just have been a lot of serp movement lately.

You may want to tone down your page, probably your link text as well.

While it may not exactly be spamming your keywords appear far too many times on your page....

tourism=35
adventure travel=8
piedra blanca=17
ecuador=30
trekking=5
off the beaten track=5
ecotourism=29

Check out this article also
http://www.gorank.com/research/11102004_MSN_Yahoo_Google_Density_Report.php

great article rtchar!

And the interesting thing is that within a few days, this post will probably rank higher than his pages because of your inclusion of those specific keywords in the post.

Thanks for the advice guys. That's an interesting article - from it we can interpret that the optimum page-wide keyword density for google is what? As low as 2.5%???

We are ALL just guessing what Google is looking for this week. Always take advice with a little caution .... and a lot of experimentation!

I have tried de-optimizing some pages which resulted in little change in rankings. But even that proved I did not need to repeat my keywords 35 times.

I removed a few keywords each week then waited to see if rankings changed. Then I would remove a few more ....

Look at your competitors in the top spots. How often are they using keywords? What is their density?

Then remove a few more ...

What if the sites ranked above you all have PR higher than you, even though all the ranked pages are deep into subdirectores and all of which (sub-directory pages) have a PR lower than you? Seems to me, that the only thing going for the higher ranked sites than me at the moment is higher PR on the primary page. Is there a work-around for this? I wouldn't ask here normally, but thought it was related.

Page Rank is only one of the 100+ factors Google uses to rank results. There a plenty of low PR sites that dominate their keywords.

Just keep experimenting ...