Are the Real Estate Web Masters Missing Something?

Realtors' Dominate the Real Estate Market

Sounds obvious. You might even wonder, briefly, who else would want IN that market.

One of my small business clients, Greg Off - of gregoffhomes.com - is a home builder who offers a small but very nice selection of homes online. Our first look at getting him ranked highly for the keywords he needed was an eye popper.

Some of the sites he would be competing against had as many as 1700 incoming links - and not just for keywords like "real estate" or "real estate in [location]". Terms like "homes", "new homes" etc were completely dominated by real estate web sites.

So what? Right? That's what realtors do, after all... sell homes.

It didn't look like Greg was going to get 1700 links by posting blog entries, articles, forum comments and from gathering links from perpipheral industries. As a small business with small business resources, and with no network of same industry collaborators, Greg was boxed out, except for PPC.

Real Estate agents and agencies have a nearly limitless supply of link swapping partners, and what an advantage it has been for them! But, Google wants a world in which incoming links stand for something - something more than a league of industry professionals boosting page rank for each other by design. Google has long been reducing the value of reciprocal links, but recently took aggressive action direclty against the real estate industry for their link swapping practices.

As I'll show in a moment, some of the real estate web masters don't yet get it. And, since they aren't the only industry that will take these penalties, it's a good idea to know how and why it came down and then avoid it.

Google's Penalty and Real Estate Web Sites

A simple fact: Recent adjustments (read - "penalties") for real estate sites with farmed links is just the beginning. Google has identified the sort of linking done there as un-natural and unfair, doesn't like it, and will continue to work against it. I'm surprised, really, that it has taken this long.

The lesson for everyone should be that natural linking is what will drive top positions. But, did the real estate guys pick up on that? Nope - at least, not all of them did. In a puclic forum, link below, they continue to discuss how to get around Google, how to loophole their link exchanges, how to continue to dominate their market through links that are swapped for the clear purpose of driving their relevance.

It is, by Google's policy, not acceptable. They're going ahead anyway, which absolutely guarantees that Google will institute measures that we will all have to to contend with. Right now, at least as appearances go, these penalties are levied with pin-point accuracy where the target is a specific group. The long term result, however, will be an algorithm adjustment to locate this general type of linking and greatly reduce the value of links of the type.

Here's the simple fix: Don't farm links. Don't joing link exchange programs, even in your industry. Don't swap links for the purpose of boosting your relevance - even when the exchange would seem to be mutually beneficial.

And, it's probably not too soon to get that note out to your clients about that page of "recommended sites" where 85% of the sites on that list can be found on the "recommended sites" list on  all of those other sites. It isn't "natural".   

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?s=565a29c1ef811ab7eb384df4fd8639cb&t=15738