Ive a geo dot com domain for a City in Europe, last year it got spammed with thousands of links took months of work to clean up the link profile, sumitted a reconsideration request and Google droppd the manual spam action, the website returned to top 10 rankings in the USA, UK, Canada on Google except for the country the city is located in where its not ranking well at all, 300 or 400th position where it used to be top 10. I tried setting the webmaster tools to geographically target the country and the result was that ranking dropped in USA, UK and Canada and there was no impact on rankings in the target country. I turned off geographic targeting and rankings returned in usa, uk and canada. Really frustrated why not ranking well in target country , bounce rate below 15% and quality content updated daily on it. Anyone have any ideas?
Well I would rather consider the following steps: 1 Do an analysis of bad links again 2 Get trust links to the problematic domain 3 Wait one month 4 And if change does not happen by asking the google request.
Probably the worst idea and could be what gave you the penalty in the first place. Links should never be valued based on PR, that is so dumb. Also avoid going crazy with anchor text, this is also a penalty guarantee. IMO google will be watching your site very closely after recovering from your penalty, my advice would be not to build any new links at all. Do you have a social media presence? If not, get one on the 3 biggies, facebook, twitter, and g+ - if there is any networks specific to your sites industry start there too. Added with your current content development strategy once you start blasting your content to social media hopefully you bounce back to your former glory. Also research what kind of rich snippets and meta data you can provide to google based on your site. I would start with authorship for your G+ - even if you rank lower than the top 3 and you are the only one to have a picture on your SERP for your site you will get some decent CTR to your page. PM me if you want some more help, happy to assist.
Welp, he had a bunch of spam links, so I assumed that they were NOT his main keyword, so actually adding few more links with EXACT keyword will not trigger a penalty.