Real Estate Forums

HHI Golf Guy · 02-19-2008, 12:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NealRM

This needs to be clarified a little. Google went after paid advertising that passed SEO juice. Google does not have any issue with selling or buying advertisements that follow its guild lines. So ads are back to were they should be, as a means of informing others about your product or moving traffic to your site.

Right now Google seems to be concentrating its paid link attacks on a select set of web sites. For example, I have not seen any newspaper sites or big name, mainstream sites get hit with the paid link penalty. I may be wrong about that - I really have not paid attention to all the sites that have been penalized.

Most sites that have been penalized seem to have to do something with SEO, especially directory sites. I guess you could say that if a site sells links and has a high toolbar PR, that site is a candidate for a penalty. More than likely the site achieved its high PR by trying to game the system to get its inbound links.

With that being said, I run dozens of local and regional portal web sites that rely on advertising as their source of income. This isn't penny ante stuff, either. We're talking over $500k in annual revenues (and growing). We never, ever ask for our advertisers to provide links back to our sites. But we're still taking precautions by adding the rel=nofollow tag to the ads on our sites.

As long as Google is very specific in who they target and penalize, I have no problems with that. But if Google makes this a mainstream event and starts penalizing most sites that have paid advertising, then we'll all know it's a conspiracy to drive people to Adsense.

Frankly, it sucks that Google can dictate how we treat or reward our advertisers by penalizing our sites on a whim. But right now there is no other choice than to play Google's game. I know that Google is trying to weed out the bad apples. Let's hope they remain careful in their approach.

If you have paid ads on your site, use the rel=nofollow tag on those ads. If you buy advertising in hopes of getting a PR or rankings boost, you're wasting your time. You need another link strategy.

dubaiprop · 03-23-2008, 05:24 PM

Most SEOs now tell me that its useless to trade links but I still trade links with quality and highly relevant sites.

teamaguilar · 03-25-2008, 04:22 AM

are not useless, just less used.

coglethorpe · 03-25-2008, 08:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SEOWolf

Neal that is something I would like to hear HHI Golf Guy delve into in detail.

I'd also love to hear more about this. I heard a couple of years back that one-way links were far superior to two-way links, so I've always considered two-way links a distant second.

HHI Golf Guy · 03-25-2008, 10:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by coglethorpe

I'd also love to hear more about this. I heard a couple of years back that one-way links were far superior to two-way links, so I've always considered two-way links a distant second.

I think the quote that you mentioned was related to buying links, and I gave my opinions on that above.

But I think you wanted to know more about some of the currrent thoughts about reciprocal links. So here it goes:

If your link strategy is based predominantly or solely on reciprocal links, then for competitive terms you are wasting time and energy. If you're in a market where the SEO competition is weak, then your site can do well with reciprocal links.

Please don't confuse the strength of SEO competition with the number of competing pages or sites. I'm specifically talking about the SEO efforts of competing sites in that market.

There are a few SEO types out there that think they can disguise reciprocal links by placing them in sidebars on primary content pages. Sometimes they also add a paragraph or two of text along with the recip link. This is stupid.

Number one, it's not very professional for an agent in Peoria to have links and content from other cities and states spread throughout their web site. What the hell is a potential buyer client supposed to think when they see that crap? Would you put flyers and posters of other agents and brokers in your office? Of course not! Then don't do it on your web site.

Second, it's just another attempt to game the search engines. While it may pass the SE algorithms today, it will eventually be exposed and the search engines will either devalue the links or penalize one or both of the sites involved.

Look at it this way: The same time and effort you spend looking for and managing reciprocal links is better spent on blogging, content building, and other methods of finding quality links.

simpleton · 03-26-2008, 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NealRM

This needs to be clarified a little. Google went after paid advertising that passed SEO juice. Google does not have any issue with selling or buying advertisements that follow its guild lines. So ads are back to were they should be, as a means of informing others about your product or moving traffic to your site.

I agree - I read something from Cutts stating that advertising is great, good, ideal, needed, an important part of business etc... they just want people to use the nofollow attribute.