Google knocked out some of my local sites. Any thoughts?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Karl Kulikov: Hi guys, I have a limousine company and we service all Southern California, Los Angeles, Orange County and inland empire, so I created multiple websites for different areas, before 2013 my sites where showing up good city by city, but now looks like google pick only one major site to rank and knocked out my other once, is there any way for me to get them back on track or that's how it is from here on out??thanks.
  P.s some of my competitors (bigger companies with bigger budgets) still have multiple sites and they rank just fine, I am just wondering why and how does google sorts it out. #googlequestion #smallbusiness #google #googleranking
• 
  Ranu Jain: Hi Karl,
  
  Could you please share the URLs of your websites?
• 
  Karl Kulikov: Sure www.ocluxurylimo.com, www.serpentinelimo.com (main), www.partylimousinebus.com
• 
  Mikita Shah: Hi +Karl Kulikov ;
  I have seen the URL of your  ;websites. They are well built from SEO point as the On Page work is quite well done. I would suggest you to have more concentration on Off page and marketing that would automatically raise the level. Promote your website to all social networks that would give your strong base. ;
  
  Hope my suggestion is worthy for your site.
• 
  Harry Dance: Hi Karl, to be honest you have multiple problems with the onsite and it could be that your rankings have dropped significantly due to the Google updates.
  the initial problems I saw include :
  -Keyword stuffing in the footer
  -duplicate versions of the homepage
  - non specific h1's and text.
  
  best to have a look at this ;http://searchengineland (dot)com/seotable to have a basic idea of what you need to do, then you can expand from that. Don't get caught up on the detail and just slowly implement the changes and you should see some positive change. Drop me a message if you need more help.
• 
  Karl Kulikov: Thank you so much guys, really appreciate the feedback.
• 
  Greg Kristan: Also just to add if you are internally linking all of those domains together that will raise a flag to Google as they are all probably associated under your name with the same credit card info!
  
  It makes it look like you are trying to game the system and artificially give more links to more things you own!
• 
  Chris Taylor: +Harry Dance ;Completely agree with you as there are so many on-page issues which need to be resolved asap. I think you should focus on social media and off-page too.... ;
• 
  Daniel Delos: Two big issues you want to avoid:
  
  1. Doorway pages -- almost duplicate content pages but targeting different locations. So make sure all the sites are unique.
  
  2. Link network of sister sites. I would switch all the links between these sites to nofollow. Yes you will lose a lot of link juice but it's almost certainly going to be seen as manipulative by Google.
  
  If these sites all have the same web host and registrant, even the algorithm could see it as manipulative.
  
  A lot of this still does work for local SEO but it's been warned against for a long time.