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Dog grooming is not blogged about much, but perhaps you could try to arrange an event for dog owners to teach them about dog grooming, or perhaps you can try to speak at an event where dog owners gather? By establishing yourself as an expert on dog grooming in your area, you should start to rank well in local searches.

I'm not an expert on local search, but it probably won't hurt to be on Foursquare and so on as well (http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/for-local-seo-use-check-ins-at-foursquare-and-facebook/)

We have noindexed all the category pages. This blog post features pictures of 21 different celebrities, so that by itself are 21 different categories. All our categories are listed at

http://dress.yournextshoes.com/category/celebrities/

http://dress.yournextshoes.com/category/brands/

http://dress.yournextshoes.com/styles-materials/

Hi Andy,

Do you mean the links to the category pages? I think they're helpful for readers who want to explore further. Perhaps we should move them to the bottom of the page?

Stay away from directories and never pay for links. If I were you, I'd consider the following:

1. If you have a newsworthy story of any kind, try to approach journalists in your area or any local news site/forum. Any kind of publicity is likely to lead to natural links coming back to your website.

2. Use Meetup.com to find bloggers in your area or people with a passion for dogs that blog. Networking and making friends in your target community will be good for your website, but it will take time.

3. Creating a Facebook page is less important than it used to be as reach is down (i.e. your posts are unlikely to reach the people who've liked your page), but you should still have a Facebook page as it's a good way to update everyone on what you're doing. It also helps build authority.

Jane, good answer. Your Next Dress could definitely benefit from more backlinks. But I don't think a lack of backlinks is the reason why we're being penalized by Google.

Anyway, you can see my other query on "windy skirt", which we used to rank for. Now all the top 18 search results are Youtube videos, which at least explains why we're not ranking for that query.

I have no idea when this happened, but Google certainly is not providing a good search experience for this query. Imagine if there was a way to reach out to Google about this. Now that would be something.

Thanks a lot for checking. We do not rank at all, not even within the top 50 results. Our writer spent a lot of time researching the blog post, and we had to pay dearly for the celebrity images.

One of our blog posts (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/celebrities-dresses-skirts-wind/) used to rank well for "windy skirt", but we're not ranking anymore. When I search for "windy skirt", all the top 10 results are Youtube videos. Is anyone else seeing this?

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Thank you for the responses. Google is actually crawling our site quite frequently, and there seems to be no problem. I guess we're just stuck in the dark on this one.

Your Next Dress (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/) has been performing poorly in search for a long time.

My theory is that Google's algorithm somehow thinks our content is poor, and that we're not ranking for that reason. While we have deleted hundreds of blog posts and improved plenty of others, our SEO has continued to tank and recently reached zero. We do not have a manual penalty of any kind, though I've tried to disavow dubious looking links just in case.

Is there anything that I am missing?

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When in Wordpress, click on "Appearance", "Editor", and you'll likely find "Footer" in the right column. I would guess that is where they included it.

Congratulations!

I am sure getting the manual penalty revoked involved some hard work. Keep us updated on how long it takes for your search performance to improve.

We have filed a few reconsideration requests in the past, and in all but one case I have received responses about there being no manual penalty.

A few years ago we had a site that had been manually penalized, but we did not know about it (no notification was sent to us through Google Webmaster Tools). After we sent a reconsideration request, the manual penalty on this site was removed.

For the sites that did not have a manual penalty, we have not seen any impact (negative or positive) as a result of the reconsideration request.

Since you know about several issues that are hurting your SEO performance, in your case I would likely work on those before contacting Google. I have only contacted Google for sites that I believe don't have significant issues.

Since these are affiliate links, I believe they should be marked as nofollow, otherwise they might be considered paid links and penalized. However, if the links are through one of the major affiliate networks, then I believe Google is already aware that they are affiliate links and won't pass the link juice. I'd consider it unlikely that you're being penalized if the links are through a big affiliate network (for example CJ or Linkshare).

Stay away from directories and never pay for links. If I were you, I'd consider the following:

1. If you have a newsworthy story of any kind, try to approach journalists in your area or any local news site/forum. Any kind of publicity is likely to lead to natural links coming back to your website.

2. Use Meetup.com to find bloggers in your area or people with a passion for dogs that blog. Networking and making friends in your target community will be good for your website, but it will take time.

3. Creating a Facebook page is less important than it used to be as reach is down (i.e. your posts are unlikely to reach the people who've liked your page), but you should still have a Facebook page as it's a good way to update everyone on what you're doing. It also helps build authority.