Recently I had engaged some company by the name B* to do some Local citation. They pick for me some of the popular business directory or so? I guess, such as yel* and some others, but I realise my rank sank shortly after some of the links was done(not sure if it was indexed) and the rank remain N/A for quite a while on some keywords. I not sure if Local citation is a neutral party or its could cause ranking to sink. I am more paying attention to my ranking ever since penguin live roll out, checking all possibility for ranking changes. I also did other SEO work like PBN, and diversed SEO package. Trying to narrow down the culprit and do a disavow on bad links. Anyone got bad experiences with local citation ?
Could be the diverse seo package, what was the velocity like, the same or higher compared to your normal seo efforts? Did you create your own pbn or did you buy a dime a dozen type of posts? Can't say for sure until we get some insight into these questions.
There's a local SEO sub-forum here on Black Hat World. http://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/local-seo.209/ I've placed citations in popular free directories and paid local directories, and I've never had this problem with any of the citations I've built. I've seen rankings drop a few positions before going up (a "dance" in the SERPs), but I've never had any pages drop any further than that.
Actually worth it - especially if you work on say a local business, whitespark and brightedge are the best tools out there. They can show where you are missing out on compared to competitors say, Search is becoming much more localised and the map is very important to be in the top three of. You'll also need to ensure you NAP details are correct and create a google account just for this reason - yeah it's boring but it will help out if the client is locally based, alongside a decent Google My Business. In terms of anchor - citations are merely based upon the business name. Happy to have a quick look if you want some tips.
