kipdraper.com

Thought for sure he would do a small (or big) vacation post on this monumental change. I finally quit checking his feed for the month, knowing he has his toes in the sand somewhere and is smiling like a Cheshire Cat.

My Webmaster Tools link isn’t where it used to be (”My Account” is a bit confusing now, a first for Google & me) so I searched “google webmaster tools”, and there’s the 5-star spam general at #3, reaching out to webmasters with a headshot vid grab as his image, a nice instructional video, and some oh so subtle, inexpensive marketing finesse. Think he’s spanking the #1 and #2 spots for click-throughs?

No not with AdWords. Perhaps this has been going on for awhile and many have noticed, but it finally has my undivided attention. For instance, lately when my wife enters a new listing as a blog post, she’s usually ranking on the first couple of pages with a few of the terms taken from the title of that post—IN 5-MINUTES. And I’m talking about main Google SERPs, not a “blog search”.

For example, she did a post on trail trees this morning. I made a cup of coffee and searched for bear face trail tree. Well what do you know, there’s the root at the top of page two (of course it could drop or move up). And note that keyword-rich title tag.

Granted they’re only showing the root and not the actual post yet, and results will vary based upon the domain and the competitiveness of the search, but Bear face trail tree is nicely highlighted, and it’s the right up top of the blog when they arrive. Not saying it works every time; it doesn’t, but things are obviously heading in that direction. Something to show your sellers in five minutes? I’ll take it.

Is this a blog-specific phenomenon? Feed-specific? It’s been so long since I uploaded/tested a new static page.

So much for this being all about Advanced Access sites. Reportedly, many Real Estate Webmaster (REW) sites have now taken the fall. And on the heels of that, LinkURealty templates, and now most recently, AgentImage sites are reporting penalties.

An penalized Advanced Access user informed me that by removing his state pages and doing a reinclusion request, his site is starting to appear again in the Google SERPs (only 2 weeks post-penalty). I would think that this approach would work for other affected template sites.

Google recently took a bite out of agents’ rankings that were using Advanced Access website templates. The reason for this penalty is the manner in which many agents use unrelated links to each other’s websites to improve their search engine rankings. Basically, they employ a “directory”, usually organized by state, with links to every agent in the country and beyond. This is better known as a “link exchange”. Of course, this is useless to the user and Google thinks so too, and they’re on the hunt to penalize the guilty.

Although it’s pretty much confirmed that this was a hand-edit by both Yahoo and then Google, there’s evidence that this is just the tip of the iceberg, as other non-AA websites using this spam technique are doing forum posts about being dropped by the search engines. Other sites using this method have seen a significant portion of their indexed pages go into Google’s supplemental results, as was warned by Google engineer Matt Cutts in his Google Hell blog post:

As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less.

The owner of Advanced Access has spoken to Google and they assured him that he wasn’t being singled-out, there’s more to come, and the only way for agents to recover their rankings is to delete their state pages and do a reinclusion request. Incidentally, agents using Advanced Access templates without engaging in reciprocal linking were apparently not hit, so the fault lies with the agents or their webmasters, not the template company.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. This is huge for the industry as well over half of all agents’ websites I’ve reviewed use this technique; frankly, if I had to put a number on it, I’d say over 80% of the sites I’ve looked at over the years. The domino effect will be staggering to say the least.

Since day-one, I’ve deleted or ignored every link exchange request I’ve received from other agents, and I was often asked why and usually offered only a smile. Now you have my answer.