Penalization or over optimization?

I have a niche site that's only about 3 weeks old. The keyword has relatively low competition. I've hardly done any linkbuilding on it yet, so I'm not expecting it to rank particularly well for any terms, but I am seeing some strange things.

Let's say that my main keyword is Ladies Socks. It's not, but let's say it is. Well my domain name is LadiesSocksNow.com. I would expect my site to rank #1 or close to it for the query LadiesSocksNow, but it's consistently been around #19-21. There used to be a website called LadiesSocksNow.info, so there's a bunch of results (such as alexa, SEMRush, flippa) about this old website outperforming my new website. There's even a few about LadiesSocksNow.com ahead of me!

As for the keywords I'm actually targeting, they're ranking from #70 to #200 and dancing pretty hard. Like I said, I'm not expecting to rank for this keywords so soon, but I'm concerned with what I'm seeing. I was planning on dripfeeding some PBN links very soon, but I fear it may be a lost cause if it's already been penalized or the on-site SEO sucks.

Another strange thing about results for LadiesSocksNow is that my site only has one result in the top 50, and it's for an inner page. I would expect multiple pages to rank, and for the home page to be the top result. This is the case for other niche sites that I have built recently.

It's worth noting that I owned LadiesSocksNow.info about 3 years ago, made some good money from it, but ultimately got slapped (probably from buying PBN links in a network that got discovered). The site has been expired for a long time, but I still have the articles from it, which I reused on this new site.

I'm not sure how to diagnose this without using GWT, which I'm reluctant to do for obvious reasons. I'm probably just going to switch my focus to other money sites that are behaving normally, but if this is fixable I'd like to figure out how to diagnose the problem.

If you over optimize, you are penalized, so they are not two different things.

wierdwinding said:

If you over optimize, you are penalized, so they are not two different things.

Click to expand...

Semantics I guess, I never really thought of it as a penalty per se, but I see what you're saying.

What I mean to ask is if there could be some other penalty at play, and how to determine this without GWT. Perhaps G somehow knows that I've reused content from the slapped site, even though it no longer exists and technically isn't duplicate content.

I once read somewhere that a good test for overoptimization is looking at LadiesSocksNow type queries and seeing how it ranks. Then retool your content and see how the result changes. In my case, I've got a partial keyword match in the domain name, and I'm not sure if this could be wreaking havoc since every internal link carries the keyword. If that's a problem, then I'm pretty much boned, and testing optimization won't yield any conclusive results.