Google Local dropped ranking

Hello,

I hope this has not already been covered since I tried to read as many forum entries as possible over the past few weeks.
I have a website and started doing SEO for it myself. I started out about 5 months ago. Now my listing for service + city is positioning well. Currently position 4. I am also ranking well for other specific keywords. I was recently working on the Google Local raking and was trying to improve it. I first got into the 10 pack. Then into the seven pack and thereafter position number 5.
But no matter what I tried I could not improve my ranking from number 5. I put in allot of work trying to improve my listing and increase my citations but for some reason new citations never showed up. To my surprise last week, bamm!!!

All at once 14 new citations appear. Of course I was excited and expected my ranking to improve to position 1 or at least 2.
After two days my Google Local ranking dropped to 34.
First I thought, well sometimes google changes your ranking temporary while adjusting your rank and that after a day or two I would be back in the 7pack with a higher position. But this was about 4 days ago now.

Any ideas???

Thanks alot!

What about the other sites in the results? Have they changed?

Also, what about your reviews? Have you received any negative ratings?

Thank you for the response,

The other sites have not changed. No I do not have any bad reviews. I have 7 positive reviews. 3 coupons and a total of 17 citations. Also, I just checked again and I moved two positions up. But still in the 30's vs. my previous position 5. I am not sure how or why google added 14 solicitations basically over night.

My ranking still has not changed back. I also checked if I had any warnings or penalties, but this is not the case. Any ideas what could be going on? Has anyone experienced anything similar?

Have you changed the name of the listing or any of the categories?

Have you verified the proximity of all of the competitors to city center vs your location to the city center? Closeness to city center still plays a roll so maybe they are more centrally located then you.

No, I did not change anything on the listing.

I am aware of the fact, and I am close to the city. But even if my competition is closer to the city, this would not cause me to lose 30 places in rank as I stated in my first post.

I don't think anything is going to be solved this way. What's the listing? Maybe if we could take a look, less detective work would be required.

A missed opportunity

The only thing that changed is the large amount of citations that got indexed into google local over night.

Ok,

I appreciate you being willing to take a look at it.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=8997192010660569791&q=data+recovery+orlando&gl=us&hl=en&cd=21&cad=src:pplink&ei=hYH5SpXOJKH-zQTux_ysDw

Thanks!

This is something I also noticed but with reviews. Everything gets counted all at once.

Are any of your citations on bad neighborhood websites? Just throwing darts in the dark here..

No, but I have noticed that one of the citations is totally unrelated from a newswire press release. Is there any way to remove a citation?

Just an observation and I know many people do it but could you have gotten jammed up by trying to force a keyword into there? Your company name is the only thing that is supposed to be in the title and you have added "Data Recovery Orlando." Again, I know many others do it but maybe all the citations being counted for your listing opened some eyes.

Looking solely at the map, you are closer to the Orlando marker than several of your competitors plus, you have reviews while some ranking higher then you have no reviews. Odd.

I suppose to remove some citations you could go to said website and request they remove your information but I don't think it being unrelated will hurt you. One of the members here (Fathom) conducted a test and placed citations on unrelated sites and it improved his rankings. I was wondering if some how a citation of yours wound up on a bad site.

One other thing that popped into my mind while typing, is there a dupe listing somewhere? I tried snooping around and didn't notice anything but an idea.

Sorry I personally couldn't help further. Hopefully someone can help you figure it out. Please report back with any findings and when your results bounce back.

Or maybe some spam sites set up for the sole purpose of artificially manipulating your ranking, say in orlando or daytona maybe?

Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean you should too. Especially when a flood of new citations would be coming in soon. The nail that sticks out gets hammered kind of thing.

But, I don't know if that's why your ranks dropped, I'm just saying I noticed. And I only looked at it for < 5 mins.

Have you been to getlisted.org? Try them and see if you're missing anything.