Here is my 2 cents on REW and AA. When it comes to Seo REW likes to push the envolope with the tactics they use for Seo. This can sometimes be good or bad. The good in being risky with Seo is that you will see high rankings and high rankings = $$ for agents. The bad side of this and each site owner must weigh the pitfalls, is that REW and AA again IMO is showing up on Googles radar more now which MAY lead to Google peaking in on their customers sites more.
If this is the case then those clients of REW and AA will only realize that earning potential for a short term and risk their online income futures. Just as Google can ban customers of a whole hosting provider, I would imagine they could any customer using a particular service provider.
When AA started to show up on Yahoo's radar look what happen there. What is about to come out of my mouth the debil...
is making me write. Morgan is a very clever Sem, sometimes maybe to clever, but not as clever as those people working for Google. The people at AA are clever, the people in Jays group are clever but again not as clever as those people working for Google. Now that these people/companies are on Googles radar only time will tell as to what the future holds for them.
The biggest problem I personally see with some of the tactics Morgan/REW uses is they are very risky and appear to be very unnatural from a linking perspective. This is not to say REW is the only group that uses its network to create link farms but over the last year I have seen Google cracking down on this type link farming more and more.
Remember only 4 years ago you could stuff hidden text and keywords all over a website and it would rank high. 3 years ago you could acquire thousands links from any themed website using your anchor text and you would rank high. 2 years ago you could acquire thousands of recip links in a short time and rank high quickly. 12 months ago for competitive real estate markets age of the site, age of the links, some onpage Seo and about 9 to 18 months is what it took to get high rankings in google if you are using white hat Seo. Now I believe recips are dead, link farms will soon be the kiss of death, template sites will hurt you, template content will hurt you and not keeping a site updated with links and content will cause a loss of trust with Google.
Real estate IMO again is now in the forefront of industries the search engines are watching for Seo practices that dont meet their guidelines. In the past SEs knew of these loopholes some SEOs were using in real estate but never took a long hard look at these providers and groups. Yahoo was the first to examine real estate sites and made an algo change. Google is now following suit with more changes I feel will come with their algo as it relates to real estate and link farms this year.
Sorry I am being long winded. My point is this. The SEs are cracking down on real estate related websites. Their reasoning is simple. All the major SEs are coming out with or buying their own online real estate portals that will generate them income/ consumer base. Some have even aligned themselves with some bigger real estate companies. From a business perspective it only makes good sense for them to make it very difficult for anyone to compete with them. Hense I believe what we have seen happen to REW, AA and other real estate service providers is only scratching the surface of whats coming for changes in the SEs algos for real estate sites. The dust hasnt settled yet so IMHO its to early to predict how harsh these coming algo changes will be and the type of Seo that will be required to get high rankings.
In the end I believe that the SEs will only count natural links. Recip links and those using link farms to manipulate Google rankings will soon find the SEs very unforgiving as they do in Yahoo. If the penalties that AA and REW sites received were only 30 days. I see this as a warning to those providers that Google has something on the horizon to be released that wont be as forgiving.