Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yeah I've spent the last couple of hours looking for info on this problem.  Almost everyone is saying "too many links can't hurt".  There's just no other explanation for what happened this morning.  I was doing perfectly fine in the SERPS then right when Google recognizes all my new links, I fall back to nothing immediately.

So I made a big mistake.  I know it was dumb.  I took a chance and got screwed.  I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site.  Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought.  My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link.  I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap.  So I thought... Hey!?  Why not!

About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100.  Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move.  I just figured if they got away with it, I could.

I'm a white hat seo'er from now on.  I've learned my lesson.  Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100.  Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant.

Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links.  He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today.  Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS?  Or am I screwed for good?  This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood.  Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then.

I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me.  Ouch.  If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit.  Please give me some good news

One last thing.  I would love to tack on a bit of my USP to the title of the pages such as: "Product + City | USP" but I worry that I would take a hit in rankings because my title is not an exact match with what most people are searching for.  Right now there is a close competitor that has pages for "Product + City" in their title, EXACTLY the same way that I do.  I think a bit of USP would help CTR soar above the competitor.  But if I do that and fall to the second page then it won't help at all.

Do you think this is something I should be worried about?

Thanks for the thoughtful answer!  In my case what I have found is opposite a little actually.  My service is available throughout my entire county.  I am trying to not be spammy in my seo but It's just too difficult right now to make 100% original content for each city I am ranking for.  Whereas sites that are ranking above me seem to have less back links and authority but they actually have a physical location and are only offering services in one or two cities.

Is it possible to outrank the smaller websites for their cities if I gain even more trust with the search engines?  Right now I just began my linking campaign, and I don't have a whole lot.

Thanks for the answer.  I am curious about one thing.  In your testing did you use the state along with the city name ever?  I am convinced that in searches most people do not use the state abbreviation, but I want to show up for those who do.  I doubt that using the state in the title/h1's/links etc would make too much of a negative impact, but perhaps it is lowering the weight of the more important keywords ie. product+city as to lower rankings.  Do you have any experience with this?

I run a local business, and I'm working on ranking for keyword + city.  I currently rank on the first page for just about every keyword I'm working on, but only the top 3 for a little less than half.  Because the search volume is so low for each keyword (for most cities Google doesn't have an estimated monthly search volume) the grand total of a few searches a month for each keyword + city combination is where I get my traffic.

Although I seem to be getting consistently higher in the rankings, I am curious as to how much more traffic I can expect.  I read somewhere that sites that are ranked number one are clicked 50% of the time, number two 20% of the time, number three 15% and from there on it goes down fast.  Rank 7 and on is below 1%.  Probably around 30% of my keywords are ranked between 7-10 and probably about 20% are ranked 4-6.

Are the CTR numbers fairly accurate?  I understand that there are a lot of influences on CTR, such as title/description, but generally is that somewhat accurate?

If it is, I am missing out on A LOT of traffic.

I am pulling about 800 unique visitors a month from Google.  If I get in the top 3 for most of my keywords, can I expect significantly more traffic?  I ask the question because there are many other things I could be doing with my time to help the business aside from SEO.  I don't want to be working constantly on SEO if traffic is only going to increase very little.