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Thanks for the tips but I would love to know if you have any experience with receiving a penalty and not recovering your rankings even a year later. Also, its quite confusing that the DA is not bad!  Is that a symptom of a bigger issue?

Hello, It is very common for keyword rankings to fluctuate almost constantly, for a few reasons: search engines are constantly updating their ranking algorithms; rankings are based on user behavior-based signals like how often a link is clicked, bounce rate, etc., and those things are never constant; depending on your location and previous search results and actions, search engines will change the results you see personally; and on and on. It's better to look at trends in your aggregate rankings rather than individual rankings, and also to focus on things like providing great content and building an authoritative linking profile than to focus on individual rankings on a day to day basis. Overall, I do think you will see more stability when search engines have more data about how users interact with your site, but I know that the fluctuations in rankings will never stop. They will likely become less drastic, though.

Chris, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this thorough answer! Truly proud to be part of such a great community! You said some really great points and put some of my worries to ease. I will continue link building and making a few corrections. Thanks again for your helpful advice! Rachel

If these were previously closed locations or removed in Google My Business then most likely Google picked them up from the aggregators. It sounds as if that's the case, as those locations were probably listed on other websites, the local search data providers. Moz has more information about these here: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-providers What you'll need to do is figure out where your other listings are--and get those removed, as well. Otherwise, even if you get them removed from Google again they will show up again once Google pulls the data from the data providers again.

Hi Logan, These pages will be eventually transformed into unique landing pages for each state so I don't want to get rid of them as of yet. I will try demoting them. Any ideas to how they are getting the anchor text of TX and NY? Thanks for your valuable time!

Hi Miriam, Thanks for all your help! You gave awesome and clear advice. Good luck to you, Rachel