I have been running a community web site for 10 years now. It was on top of Google for the key words "washington dc" for as long as I can remember. Then it suddenly dropped to nowhere land. I just do not understand what we are doing wrong. If you have any idea please help. Thanks in advance.

Luke Wilbur
Washington DC City Pages
DCpages.com

Luke, thanks for your comment. After a very brief review of your site, here are some things I would suggest:

As noted above, excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods, or link buying and selling will devalue your pages in Google´s eyes. In order to get back in Google´s good graces, I would add rel=´nofollow´ to all of your affiliate links and ad space you have sold, as well as to the links to individual websites from your "directory".

Also upon further investigation, you are lacking headings tags on your pages which would help Google identify exactly what each page is about and the keywords it should associate with the page.

I hate to "venture a guess", but I believe your current 99/103 position in Google will continue to fall to around 270. If you check out "allinanchor:washington dc" (minus the quotes) you will see that although you have a lot of links (as seen by link:dcpages.com), based soley on the number of pages that link to you with the keywords "washington dc" you would be 270. Allinanchor is a simple way to see where you "should" rank if you were ranked merely on links alone (and we all know what Google´s opinion of links is). See our article about allinanchor for more information.

Hi,
Thanks for your advice. I have read your article and learn more about Google Big Daddy.
You have dictate all major points related to Big Daddy, that I was searching.
I want to ask one question if
Reciprocal links have lost value then what we have to do for link building. So that our site much crawl by search engine.

SEO Zeal Group

your blog is very informative it helps me alot
thanks and best regards

Thanks for sharing