Ranking a site with an ongoing links warning.

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

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  David Jones: Im stumped on something. Been working on a resources section on a site that ranks well for quite a few kws in Google for several years, however after almost 2 months of writing and publishing great content and building quality backlinks from authority sites in the same niche this resource section is not ranking even in the top 100 for the 2 keywords we've been targeting. The on-page isnt perfect and the SEO tools I use to analyse that give it a C score but in my experience this should really be at least in the top 20-30 by now. Ive fetched the page in Google webmaster tools, no problems there and it was submitted to the index. I dont see anything in the robots.txt file that could be blocking this either.
  
  I would like to add that currently there is an on-going warning from Google in WMT against the site regarding backlinks from dodgy sites but this is not related to either of the keywords Im targeting or this page and the main site is ranking just fine for lots of other keywords so I dont think this is related.
  
   ;Im stumped :(
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  David Jones: This is the page btw ;freelancewritinggigs[dot]com/resources/ and the 2 kws are 'Resources for Writers' and 'Freelance Writing Resources', if anyone can spot any glaring errors Id love to know!
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  Neil Hannam: Have you done some ananlysis of those pages that are ranking well above yours? Number of links, quality of those links, page and domain authority etc etc? If so how do you stack up in comparison?
  
  How competative are the two specific keywords you're targeting?
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  David Jones: yes but that doesnt tell me much, some of them are better sites (only slightly though) some are worse, the homepage actually ranks on page 5 for one of the terms and so do at least 2 guest posts I did about this resource page with the keyword and link back to it :/
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  Tim Capper: Not sure all those optimised links for : "freelance writing resource" ,  ;are helping
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  David Jones: Hi Tim, sorry Im not sure what you mean by optimised links? You mean on that page? I have one internal link using that anchor pointing back to it but actually just added that a few days ago as I thought it might help. Or did you mean the ones on other sites pointing to it? It shouldnt be a problem with those as all from good quality blog posts on the same topic that received social shares and on related sites with good authority...