Hi
I think self created links are valuable if used wisely. You should try to use those links only to build authority to your site, without trying to spam for it. This means it is better to do only a few manual links and get sure that all of those links are valuable and from authoritative sites. Hope this helps 
Best posts made by socialengaged
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RE: Self created links, are there any of vaule?
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RE: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - ranking in different countries
you may also want to try to use webmaster tools website settings to geolocalize your website
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RE: Merging Google Place Accounts to Merge Reviews for same Company
Hi, I've been digging a lot into it.. unfortunately there's no solution. The thing is if you have more pages to manage all of those separately and get more shares and reviews (you can think about targeting different local areas with different content for each for example). Hope that helped
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RE: Why my website’s ranking is being up and down?
I don't think Antony says all the story.. It happens to me as well, going down and up in the serps, and socials are talking about my brand often.. Could it be due to the Google "dancing"? I belive it may be something related to this..
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RE: Is this site hit with Penguin or something else?
You can use a tool called Panguin from Barracuda. Connected with your analytics, it shows your traffic decrease on a timeline where all algos updates (penguin, panda and various) may have affected your site. It also explains what changes happened and who spoke about these changes, when and where to find information. Hope this may help also

Eugenio
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RE: Where can I find a breakdown of google search volume by specific industry/vertical? For example, what % of people searching in google are looking for housing? Cars? Restaurants?
Hi
Sorry for repeating, but you gave the answer all by yourself: if you need to know how many people searched for "New car" in the U.S. , you can use both Adwords keyword tool and google trends to get this data. Here is an example for the car industry. Once you determine the keywords you need, you can benchmark and analyze data with many tools (eg. google trends and google adwords, or also semrush, searchmetrics, and moz tools), to get the trends and search volume for all those keywords, and get insights on the industry field youre working on.
Hope this helped

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RE: Is this ok for content on our site?
Hello I dont know if I understood well,
But there should be no prob to have some more words for content. Google likes that!
Just be sure that you do not abuse keywords. 1 or 2 times (max 3) in the whole page, and include many synonyms and variants of the keyword.But not spammy content will surely help Google understand your page, and give better results to customers

Hope this helps!
Eugenio | Social Engagement