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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 😞

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.