Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Fiorst are they good links, are they relevant, are they spammy, this is more important. Linkbuilding is very risky these days. Forcing links that will not be detected as such is very hard to do. i would be very carfull what links you get. Better to get one good link then 1,000 spammy links. at best spammy links will not add value at worst they will get you penalized if not now in teh future.

This is an interesting case.  Your analytics data definitely looks like a Penguin hit site...but when I look at your backlinks you only have 3 domains linking to you.  Penguin is almost always about GROSS abuse of anchor texted keywords in backlinks.  I just can't see that happening with only having 3 backlinking domains. I can think of a few possible reasons for your traffic to look like this: 1. Do you have a domain that you are redirecting to this one?  If the backlink profile of that domain was affected by Penguin then this would directly affect your current domain. 2. It's possible that one or more of the 3 domains that link to you were affected by Penguin and therefore, you lost the link juice from that domain on April 24. 3. When did you create this site?  It's possible that the initial traffic on your graph was a honeymoon boost that a new site often gets and you just happened to drop at the end of April. 4. You dropped from about 40 visits per day to about 15 or so.  It's possible that you were holding the #1 position but a competitor came in and beat you.  A drop from #1 to #2 or #3 could result in a decrease of traffic like this.  Mind you, you mentioned that keywords dropped to page 5 so this is likely not the case. 5. There could be some other issue that has caused you to drop such as malware, a bad robots.txt problem, etc. Edit:  I see that ahrefs reports 75 backlinking domains with your keyword being the most prominent anchor so it is possible that you were directly hit by Penguin after all. We haven't seen too many credible reports of Penguin recovery yet.  The general thought is that if you can remove all or the majority of your spammy backlinks then you can recover but seeing as there were very few reported recoveries after the refresh Oct 5, no one really knows if that is possible. There is a way to recover by migrating penalized pages to new pages though...but it's complicated and you would have to start fresh with a clean backlink profile for those pages.

Dear Russel, Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I should start by mentioning that there are some differences in Local depending on the country in which you are operating. You may need to look for extra tips specific to your country (I'm in North America) but here are the essential steps a local business needs to take. 1. It is critical before embarking on a local campaign that you understand that the heart of local in NAP (name, address, phone number). Nearly everything is dependent upon the consistency with which you publicize your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number. You only qualify as a local business if you have these three things (NAP). Whether you are on your website or off your website listing yourself in local business directories, you must consistently list your NAP in all places without variation. 2. Create an excellent, strong website with terrific content that has been written from a geographic perspective. In other words, if you are a dentist, you will be writing about the city and state you are in as well as the services you offer. You want a great homepage, great service pages, great city landing pages if you have more than one physical location and a strong contact page. Make sure that your title tags, meta, alt tags are locally-optimized and make sure that your complete NAP is in the header, footer or side navigation on every single page of your website. Make sure that your complete NAP is the first thing you put on your Contact Page. 3. Once you have your great locally-optimized website up and running, you will begin the process of getting your business profiled in the various local business indexes. In most countries, the most important of these is Google Places. It is absolutely vital that you read Google's Places Quality Guidelines and not violate any of them. Here is the link: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 You are allowed one listing per physical location, unless you run something like a medical clinic, in which case each doctor may have his own listing in addition to one listing for the whole office. Do not attempt to keyword stuff your Place Page or misrepresent your physical location. Pay special attention to each of the rules in the guidelines. Failure to comply 100% with the guidelines can lead to penalization or banning of your account. Each of the different local directories has their own set of rules that you must acquaint yourself with, and there are many, many places you can list your business. In the USA, many people choose to create their Google Place Page and then pay either Localeze.com or Universal Business Listings to automatically submit their business to a large number of local directories. Or, you can choose not to pay these companies and do it manually yourself. Here is an excellent post from Myles Anderson at Search Engine Land regarding the top 50 citation sources for the US and UK: http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938 4. Beyond inclusion in the major local business indexes mentioned in step 3, there may be other niche directories specific to your industry in which inclusion would be valuable. For example, if your business restores vintage cars, there might be some vintage car directories where you would want to be included. These niche resources you will need to hunt for yourself, depending on your industry. 5. In addition to getting profiled in directories, local business owners must also tackle the subject of user reviews. You will want to be listed at review sites and you will want to actively manage your reviews. Yelp is very major in the USA. TripAdvisor is international for travel-related sites. Essentially, you want to keep track of when and where people are reviewing you and then, if possible, thank them for their praise or attempt to help them feel better if they were dissatisfied with your service. Here is my oft-cited article on which review sites allow you which powers of response: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=502 It is essential that you develop a healthy approach to dealing with negative reviews. You must learn to respond gracefully and wisely so that you don't escalate a situation from bad to worse. There are numerous good articles out there on the web about responding well to negative reviews. Apart from responding to voluntary reviews, you will want to put a process in place for encouraging reviews from your happy customers. But remember - do not write fake reviews for your own business, do not pay any marketer to write fake reviews for your business and do not pay any marketer to post reviews that have been gathered from real customers. Reviews must ALWAYS be posted by the user directly - never by you or anyone else. 6. Once you've got all this going, what you do next depends on the type and competitiveness of your industry. In some small towns with low population and low competition, you may never need to do any more than what's already been covered, but for any business that has to compete a little harder, your next options might included beginning a blog on your site to improve your content and keep it fresh, getting involved in Social Media, video marketing, email marketing, linkbuilding or other forms of marketing. Don't forget, local businesses often need to make plans for offline marketing as well. What you do depends on how hard you need to work to get to the top. Lots of choices! I hope this response will get you started in local with the right understanding and a pro-active mindset. Miriam

Hi Chris, You've touch the exact problem I have. My website doesn't appear in Google Places at all. I am really confused about it, because I went through all Google Places guideline and make sure that everything filled in properly and account has no violetions. However my website do not want to appear in Google Places! When I did analysis of my competitors I've got a feeling that those people just appear there without doing anything!  Just because Google decided to put them. Our website has the hight DA, MT, PA among all our competitors. Please give some good tips about how to be listed in Google Places, what I should do for that and what is the best places to submit a link for GP? Cheers, Russel

I'm sorry but I honestly do not even understand what the question is here, so I'll just take a stab at it. If you want page <a>to rank for "buy car in NY" then ideally you would have page and other pages on your website linking to page</a> <a>with "buy car in NY" or something similar in the anchor text of those links. You would also help yourself out if "buy car in NY" was to be found in some way in the URL, for example, www.mysite.com/buy-car/new-york or something like that. Including the keyword or parts of the keyword in the URL of the page can have a slight impact on rankings. However, cross linking will have a bigger impact, so make sure other pages of your site have links to that page with your keywords in the anchor text of those links. I hope that answers your question.</a>

Hi Russel, I would wrap it in english text - the link will be of the greatest value in meaningful context. The parsers may not even recognize it as an english term and pass weight to the page for the english keyword. -Paul

What type of website do you have? What platform is it on? A pinging service is usually built into WordPress. If you're not getting any pages indexed, before looking at a pinging site, I'd take a look and make sure that I had a clean xml site map, good URL structure, etc.

I agree with fassa about the 1 page for 1 keyword. You page might end up ranking highly for secondary keywords that are more long tail in nature. What do you mean by the "top page of Google by 65 keywords or more"? Is that your goal? If so, that seems a little vague as you can easily rank of the top page of long tail keywords, but it doesn't mean anything if no one is searching for them.