Help Removing Your Agent to Agent Links
June 12th, 2007 by AnnaI was privileged to attend the recent Search Marketing Expo, SMX Advanced 2007, in Seattle, Washington this week. During the Penalty Box Summit session I was involved in some Q & A that involved real estate websites. To be honest I did not intend to ask much more than a general question, but as we dug deeper it became real estate specific. Matt Cutts of Google stated that when we see penalties occur, such as some of the recent real estate website penalties, that webmasters should take that as a sign. Matt stated that conferences and the Q & A time is the best way to publicly say that Google intends to do more about the issue. The issue at hand was the real estate industry being known for its over-zealous reciprocal linking, especially among fellow agents. It was also clarified that different industries are handled differently, and real estate is on the list right now. While recent penalties have been manual, they intend to do as much on the algorithmic side as possible. Tim Mayer of Yahoo concurred with what Matt Cutts said. What does all of this mean to you?
You are the webmaster of your real estate website. You are charged with your links and content to be current and in line with best practices for being found in search engines. As your provider we are your full-time partner in this venture and ongoing process. We are here to get you the best information for the current time and help you through our various Customer Support Teams to reach your goals for education and success with your website. For quite some time we have been advising you to take steps to remove the agent to agent reciprocal links from your real estate website. We understand that you are very busy and may not have time to take care of this on your own. We have been helping clients as requests are made for assistance in removing these links. We would like to publicly extend this assistance to all Advanced Access clients and encourage you to take advantage of it. To make this easy, we have implemented a new email address and form where you can easily request us to take care of the link removal for you. To request our assistance please complete our form at www.advancedaccess.com/removelinks/form.html or simply send an email to removemylinks@advancedaccess.com with your name, email address, and website address. A member of our team will take the proper steps to remove your “states pages” links and “link to me” form from your site and the content from those pages. We will also add the noindex/nofollow meta tag so that these pages can begin to fall out of the search engine indexes.
Please direct any questions regarding this issue or process to our Customer Support Team at 1-866-518-1571.
Great article. State pages today, contextual links tomorrow. Many Realtors are migrating from state reciprocal link spam, to contextual link spam. It will be best to keep a ‘clean house’ in anticipation of Google’s next real estate website penalty phase.
Joe Lane
June 14th, 2007
I agree with keeping a “clean house” but what about all the real estate websites that buy text links to increase their ranking?
Bob Lipply
June 15th, 2007
Hi Bob
Matt Cutts has specifically mentioned on his blog and also in greater detail at SMX that paid links are on their chopping block. I don’t believe that if 2 friends have a deal with each other for a text link as a one time thing are going to have an issue; how would someone know it’s paid? (As long as the link is relevant - example, a home inspector and RE agent who work together a lot, etc). But it’s those who sell links to a few or a bunch of people… those are not great and we don’t recommend those at all - they are not immune from detection by any means. Especially with the reports being made… that’s all manual stuff. Then they’ll work it into the algo.
The best advice I can give on links is that there are no “get rich quick” schemes that will have any sort of longevity. Slow and steady (and relevant) wins the race.
Anna
June 18th, 2007
Look at city site searches where google rates itself as no.1. Look at how they take sponsered links also on top as well as the right hand sides and blend the sponsers links (especially the top 3 or 4 sponsered links at the top of the page into the background. They make the difference so indistinct on tone that you have to examine it from all angles to know that it is a sponsered links. Since consumers view the first page like a triangle, the number 2 slot is now in reality the number 6th slot. Now you can tell me how white hat google is. The fish smells all the way to Texas. Whatever google decides is interesting. Black is now white. Me thinks that they are becoming extremely greedy but of course there is nothing we can do about it. But eventually it will become irrelevant as consumers will get smart about what the rankings mean.
Marguerite Kaufman
June 29th, 2007