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Not so much anymore as others have said...plus, we track heavily our inbound traffic and honestly, it's been YEARS since I ever noticed a DMOZ referral for any of our clients...

Might have been a real prize...but not so much anymore, eh!

Most of us SEO practitioners have had clients come to us with that kinda "hack" on their site....poor security or using just plain bad SEO wanna-bes might be the cause...so yes as Matt said here, tighten up your site!!!

Could you provide URLs for that?

I also dont' quite follow you - say you're looking for "plumber in Taos" -- do you mean that your site comes up 2nd?
-- if so good!

Do you mean if you're searching for "Bills Plumbing Services" (your company name) and that comes up second?

• if so, then what comes up first?

course...maybe the real question is - why would you want to detune to free??

Exact same thing has happened to us in the past too....

One of our clients is a major Canuck city's Economic Development dept whose mandate is to get new businesses and investors to come to their city to invest and open new businesses. At first, we too were denied access to anything - we had to create long Word .docs with full directions and screenshots of what to do and where to do it. However, after 5 renewals over the past 5 years, we were given full access to their site via both their CMS and ftp too...

Proving I'd suspect that trust needs to be "earned" - not given freely is how I'd see it...

Oh in another case another SEO client - a major Canuck University has not been able to give that same earned trust access as their site includes credit card info - buried deep and encrypted - but PCI specs say that they should limit access....so again we do the full Word .doc blueprints for their site....

re: directories....um...when I now think of same I use "citations" instead....and here's a great link to whitesparks list of the best citation URLs in the US and other countries too....http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country as well as I've blogged about this again just today too here....www.canuckseo.com !

I'd check over on Alan Bleiweiss's site...IMHO he's the best audit guy out there and if memory serves, he's got a checklist of some type there too...including a detailed post on same....

One more thing...

That you may also find helpful the leaked Google Qualaity Rater Guidelines - it was leaked to us SEO practitioners last July or so...

Google for that term - but here's my own blog posting on it - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2014/07/shhhh-google-quality-rater-guidelines-2014-leaked/ - and there's a link there too to download the 11 mb .pdf....

Agreed here on Monica's answer directly above....this is what should be done, eh!

As Donna pointed out, the 'delay' tween what you expect time-line wise and what Google can 'do' is often longer than anyone would wish........

ABSOLUTELY great Egol advice here.....especially on the 'variance' you'd find by filtering thru common counsel for the 'style' that you like for you and yours....

Read...learn...test...then rank...and repeat!

course...maybe the real question is - why would you want to detune to free??

I've been followin the "Negative SEO" world for years - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php?s=%22negative+seo%22 - will lead to our own blog posts on same...

Suffice it to say - please tho do read some other experts and how they say to fight off same - the best tool you have is the Google disavow one - oh, don't forget that BING has one too, eh!

Hang in. Stay on top by using a great very functional IBL tool too like majestic too...and keep on the disavow trail...is the best thing I can offer today....

Yup....Marie knows her Penguin stuff for sure...would highly recommend this Canuck!

Well....there are so so many things that can contribute to a fall in rankings...that I can't mention them all here...

But a drop - if I read you right - from #6 to #10 is not a drop really at all...just normal fluctuations...i.e. this is how the rankings flutter...

Have you checked tho to see if you're looking at the rankings using Personalized Search? Incognito? WebHistory on/off?

Do some googling for those topics....read...and learn!

Not trying to be dismissive here - just that there really is no 'answer' that you'd be satisfied with....honestly!

Your brain comes to mind....plus the months of research and testing that any due diligence would entail....

There is no shortcut to success....'cept damn hard work, eh!

Egol....your #4 - content that I will enjoy producing is SO very important....I'd a put it up at #1!

Hello EdBen...

That date seems a bit "after" the July 24th Google Pigeon update...about a month or so...but can I ask, was this rankings drop at google.com or google.co.uk?

Up here in google.ca land (Canada that is) we tend to get the changes to the major google.com algo about a few weeks after...so while Pigeon did change many things (like local listing packs, local directories, carousel items etc.) it took those weeks to be "seen" up here...

Could then, Pigeon be the culprit for your drop? Have you been able to drill-down to see if your own site has been re-ranked based on IBLs (incoming back links with authority) or new local directory reviews from say Yelp etc?

Yes...relation to the centroid of the search area is very important still (see the 2013 Local Search Ranking Factor Survey here at moz from David Mihm) as we well know...

And yes, we've had clients with the same issue too. One way that we handled that issue was to open up a "sub-office" for the client via a hot-desk at an Incubator site located across the street from city hall - ie AT the centroid! Took awhile for the updates to resolve...but the move up the Local search results happened...and they (and us too of course) were happy with the results.

Oh - they actually 'do' use the hot-desk - it's staffed by a marketing dept person every day and they 'award' the seat to a diff person each week as a sort of 'bonus'....ie the telecommuting opportunity as a reward. Works, it does!

Yeah...what I see above could ONLY be looked at as link manipulations...

Don't know how else to phrase what I mean - but it appears that you're trying to gain traffic by using all the WRONG tactics....when I see clients that use content markers as " > 2000 chars"  & "fiverr" & "boilerplate"  -- they're all telltales of trying to get real live stable rankings using 2004 tactics....sigh....

YMMV...but in my world those items you've listed show a basic fault in your whole SEO strategy, eh!