after reading over the over optimization penalty, I was aware of this. But I thought of it as keyword stuffing. I am guessing what happened, is when I cut out a lot of the other keywords, the density for the 12 that remain went through the roof. So it may have appeared to google that it was over-optimization. I also read that density for keywords shouldn't exceed 2%, is that still the benchmark? There aren't many words on our main page, mostly links to internal pages. So I am going to go back through and make sure they don't appear too often, so the page doesn't appear spammy to Google.
Before I go back through and make these changes, is there any sort of ramifications that can happen if you constantly update the on-page SEO? I'm wondering if I should just take the page back to where it was before. It was clunky and heavy, but at least it was working.