Re: Reciprocal Link Pages Dead?
I have an AA site and hit very hard by the Google penalty for having state pages.
Some history - when AA sites were hit by Yahoo, all AA sites were eliminated from the state pages (btw - the state pages were not the canned AA state pages). Formed a focus group (5) of clients and friends that are in executive search business as well as dealing with relocation and developed relocation pages that would assist people with resources and information about the state with links to the resources - newspapers, colleges, hospitals, official state pages, etc. After the focus group agreed that the pages were beneficial, each of the original 5 focus group members polled 5 people that were relocating. Based upon that input, additional information was added to the state pages. Reviewed the remaining sites to determine if they were linking back and complemented my relocation page. This activity took almost 2 months to accomplish. The end result was that a significant number of outbound links to real estate agent sites were eliminated.
The Google penalty hit.
Based upon input from Greg Boser (aka webguerilla) I eliminated all state pages and removed any link that was to a real estate related site. I received input from some other knowledgeable persons that pointed out some items that could have an adverse effect on my SERP's. Filed the reinclusion request with Google. Within 72 hours my site had improvements in positioning. The results or placements are fairly mixed from where I was originally.
I hope this experience will help others to determine a direction for their sites.
PS - I claim to very little SEO knowledge, and interested in hearing more from HHI Golf about RSS feeds, subdomains, and articles.
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