nmjudy - 4:53 pm on Dec 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

Shawn-
I'm experiencing the same problem. I do web design for a tri-city area. For city1 keyword1 keyword2 I've been blown out of the water. Also for mystate keyword1 keyword2. However, city2 keyword1 keyword2 and city3 keyword1 keyword2 I'm ranking the same as pre-Florida. City2 and city3 are much less competitive than city1. I'm also showing the dead celebrity site on the 1st page of SERPS as well as his whole famn damily website (total spam). Another 2 positions are taken up by a site that uses javascript as CSS kinda sorta to hide anchor text that ranks them so high. They now dominate all keyword variations for city1. I've reported this site several times over the past 8 months and have given up that they'll be removed. We have 2 legitimate mycity keyword1 keyword2 in the first 40 results. Other results are directories or designers from other states (with no apparent spam). A few directories are mirrored sites. Isn't that a no-no too?

My husband and I are considering a move to Tucson and just for giggles, I searched for the competition before and after the Florida update (by using the -fdgd -hfh trick) for that city. The dead celebrity's site is there as well.

I guess the way to rank well in the new Google for our keywords is to:
- be a dead celebrity
- be related to a dead celebrity
- know how to spam really really well
- remove all occurances of your location name from your pages and see what you show up for