The times they are a changin
June 19th, 2007 by AnnaWell, the times already changed. We just want to make sure everyone is keeping up. Links (certain kinds of links) in the real estate space mean something different to search engines these days (these days - more like the past couple of years, sigh). I know we have been pounding this point home, but we have a responsibility to do so. So here’s more for the poor horse who isn’t quite dead yet…
I know many of you don’t have time to sit and watch video interviews between search engines and seo companies. And where would you look to find that stuff proactively? Hopefully we can help take the needle in the haystack feeling out of your day a bit today. This is a transcript of an excerpt of an interview. Nice sentence, eh? ;) Below is a link to the video as well. I bolded the part of the interview below that especially hits home.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-smx-diaries-iv-the-matt-cutts-interview
Starting around minute 5:30
Cutts: I always enjoy when people say they have undetectable paid links because really it’s not just you who has to be undetectable, its all the people who you are linking with (buying and selling) that need to be undetectable – if they do it in a stupid way, it’s easy to catch as it only takes one mistake. We want to pursue that.
Rand: It takes a lot of human effort to watch over this.
Cutts: Yes, it takes human effort. Ideally we want to scale it in a way to algorithmically detect if it is excessive or not.
Rand: Recently, there was a thread on Real Estate Webmasters, where ‘oh my gosh’ tons of stuff was thrown out [of Google]. I had heard through the grapevine that there was some good information about how all of the real estate agents are doing reciprocal linking. That is how all of them are ranking in Google. Obviously you have been trying to combat that for a long time. Is this just for one sector or is this an algorithm you are pushing out that finally is tweaked to the right amount?
Cutts: We take different action based on different sectors. This is what we care about, in our group, how to make web spam harder, and with all these different sectors and countries you see different spam. Real estate is a little more likely to reciprocal link. We’ve heard both sides, one side says it’s not fair that they were only penalized for 30 days that it is not fair that they are getting away with it and the other side says we didn’t know it was coming. As a search engine we have to figure out what the best thing for us to do to put them on notice that this is not the best thing to do. Whether it be in real estate or any other sector.
Rand: So this is really a “pay attention guys” we are telling you not to do this, we want to put you on notice.
Cutts: Yes, certainly yes, we do stuff like that. We care about a clean index and good search experience. We want to encourage that.
Rand: So that real estate guy in Maine that is linking to the guy in CA because ‘hey I do really recommend this guy in CA’…
Cutts: OR the FOURTY guys in CA.
[Laughs]
Rand: Yes, hehe
Cutts: You recommend FOURTY guys in California from one Maine property.
Rand: Yea, that is always nice stuff.
[Continues on…]
***
So please please please, help us help you - let us know if you need help removing your agent to agent links. And be careful out there buying links, etc. (*cough* don’t.do.it *cough*) … who said that? Am I hearing voices again?
Side note - if you want us to take care of your states pages don’t actually delete your page manager states pages. We keep them, but delete the content only, then add a meta tag to noindex/nofollow each and every page in there. And we remove the links to those pages from your site (if they are still there). Then we/you don’t use those pages again. We can’t do any of that if the pages are deleted 
If you already deleted your pages, no panic needed - those pages will fall out of the index naturally over time.
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