I appreciate your help. When our site was ranking for that term it was about 5 years old. We have ranked extremely well for that term for the entire existence of our site, with the exception of after February. This drop actually occurred even before Panda was released (about two weeks before I think). I did get one of the unnatural linkings Alerts In July (well after the drop occurred). However, I did a lot of research on it, and my conclusion was unless you got one of the warning messages related to unnatural linking don’t worry about it, as the site has not actually been penalized. From my understanding this message was more or less a “change what you are doing before it gets worse” type of message. Frustratingly we have never engaged in shady practices.
The only thing we have done that people now say has no effect is article marketing. Last year, we did invest some resources in creating some very high quality articles and submitting them to a few different directories. These were very informative and useful, and not the least bit spammy. Once Panda came out we stopped. To further complicate things, we didn’t focus any of these article efforts on the “WildBlue” keyword. Prior to Feb. we didn’t have to do much work for this keyword because we naturally ranked so well.
We actually use to have that keyword in our title, but took it out just a bit ago because we were not gaining any traction, and thought it best to reinvest that space with another keyword. The most puzzling thing for me about this situation, is that I understand gradually dropping for a specific keyword due to several factors. However, being completely dropped from the rankings in one week from a keyword that your entire website is designed to represent is still very puzzling to me.
