Google penalizing real estate websites for reciprocal linking
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. 