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Not so much anymore as others have said...plus, we track heavily our inbound traffic and honestly, it's been YEARS since I ever noticed a DMOZ referral for any of our clients...

Might have been a real prize...but not so much anymore, eh!

Most of us SEO practitioners have had clients come to us with that kinda "hack" on their site....poor security or using just plain bad SEO wanna-bes might be the cause...so yes as Matt said here, tighten up your site!!!

Could you provide URLs for that?

I also dont' quite follow you - say you're looking for "plumber in Taos" -- do you mean that your site comes up 2nd?
-- if so good!

Do you mean if you're searching for "Bills Plumbing Services" (your company name) and that comes up second?

• if so, then what comes up first?

Thats - as Keri and I and Miriam already said - not how it works.

Local search is for bricks&mortar businesses...hence the use of the word "local!" - as Miriam pointed out, you want "organic" search to work for you...& not local!

Go here - http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors - and read what the globes top local search experts have to say on what 'count's for local search ranking factors...

as Keri indicated, you've got an issue in understanding what "local" really means...

prahps some research etc on same would help too....

course...maybe the real question is - why would you want to detune to free??

Exact same thing has happened to us in the past too....

One of our clients is a major Canuck city's Economic Development dept whose mandate is to get new businesses and investors to come to their city to invest and open new businesses. At first, we too were denied access to anything - we had to create long Word .docs with full directions and screenshots of what to do and where to do it. However, after 5 renewals over the past 5 years, we were given full access to their site via both their CMS and ftp too...

Proving I'd suspect that trust needs to be "earned" - not given freely is how I'd see it...

Oh in another case another SEO client - a major Canuck University has not been able to give that same earned trust access as their site includes credit card info - buried deep and encrypted - but PCI specs say that they should limit access....so again we do the full Word .doc blueprints for their site....

re: directories....um...when I now think of same I use "citations" instead....and here's a great link to whitesparks list of the best citation URLs in the US and other countries too....http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country as well as I've blogged about this again just today too here....www.canuckseo.com !

I'd check over on Alan Bleiweiss's site...IMHO he's the best audit guy out there and if memory serves, he's got a checklist of some type there too...including a detailed post on same....

One more thing...

That you may also find helpful the leaked Google Qualaity Rater Guidelines - it was leaked to us SEO practitioners last July or so...

Google for that term - but here's my own blog posting on it - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2014/07/shhhh-google-quality-rater-guidelines-2014-leaked/ - and there's a link there too to download the 11 mb .pdf....

Agreed here on Monica's answer directly above....this is what should be done, eh!

As Donna pointed out, the 'delay' tween what you expect time-line wise and what Google can 'do' is often longer than anyone would wish........

GWT for new index, then ask for complete read...then u/l a new .xml sitemap...

Far as I know - no value at all for serps....but for searchers perhaps...depends on whether it might be a transactional query or a instructional one etc etc....

I've been followin the "Negative SEO" world for years - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php?s=%22negative+seo%22 - will lead to our own blog posts on same...

Suffice it to say - please tho do read some other experts and how they say to fight off same - the best tool you have is the Google disavow one - oh, don't forget that BING has one too, eh!

Hang in. Stay on top by using a great very functional IBL tool too like majestic too...and keep on the disavow trail...is the best thing I can offer today....

Here's the iconic post on just that area - http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - from Miram who's on staff here at Moz.com...

And she addresses that too....well worth the click/thru eh!

As others have said, yeah..most likely NOT the plugin...but with that timing you may need to check on the Penguin update in Dec....

That said a gentle reminder -- that ALL SEO plugins are tools one uses to make changes to the site pages and NOT strategy items that need development first....ie they do what they're told...YOU need to know what to do on your own!

ie you can surely change a title tag - but from what to what at how long and keywords in what order etc etc - no WP plugin can help with that, eh!

If what you're asking about entails LOCAL search, then a quick look here at the moz Local Search Ranking Factors study will show more...though not spefically about what sites to gain Citations on...

For that I use Darren's Whitespark.ca for a complete clickable list one uses to build your own....

Is that what you're looking for?

Yeah...as noted the tech is ASP.NET but that has diddly to do with SEO, eh!

Course same value to the reader of that post if you just LIST the URLs, and do NOT make them real live links...

Value passed on still, eh!