Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty Part 1 | Is Your Website Affected?

I bet many of you didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a special “penalty” for real estate sites that have too many reciprocal links. What most of you do know is that Google operates on fully automated algorithms that determine relevancy based on a number of factors including the number of links to your website. What many people don’t know is that to fine-tune results and eliminate spam Google hand tailors their algorithms to compensate for industry or keyword sector specific abnormalities or trends. Not all searches are judged the same.

Real estate is a heavily marketed industry online with tons of search marketing firms and search engine optimization specialists vying for the same words, not to mention the army of “do it yourselfers.” This has resulted in the overuse and abuse of most of the outdated or less sophisticated Search Engine Optimization techniques (the process aimed at improving ones rankings in the search engines) and methodologies.

The most basic of these is reciprocal links. So many Realtors have been abusing reciprocal links and having abnormally high percentages of their inbound links come solely from link trades that Matt Cutts the Google Spam Engineer himself has specifically mentioned this sector multiple times.

Here are some quotes:

“Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.”

“Real Estate is a little more likely to reciprocal link, for example” - Matt Cutts from a video interview. Later on he adds “Yeah you can definitely do excessive reciprocal linking.”

Now besides the quotes I could point to numerous forums and case studies examining websites that have seem their rankings disappear due to what appear to be penalties from overusing reciprocal links. I don’t think the specific examples are worth examining because:

1. They represent the incorrect way to think about SEO ( as a group of tricks or an easy way to “cheat”).
2. The fact that so many people are using the same “tactic” with almost identical website should clue you in to it’s effectiveness as a “prime” strategy for promoting yourself online.

How do you know if most of your links are from reciprocals?

Well this should be really easy: are you actively using a reciprocal linking service? Are you paying a cheap SEO guru (not all cheap seo gurus are bad, but many use low skilled tactics like massive reciprocal links as opposed to more advanced SEO techniques and methodologies that involve creativity, highly skilled workers, and technology)? Are you using automated SEO software?

You can also check your back links at any time using a variety of free tools, the easiest one being yahoo site explorer. Type this: link:yourdomainhere into yahoo.com and you’ll be brought to Yahoo Site Explorer where you can view all the inbound links to your site.

Tomorrow I’ll publish a follow up with tips and advice on how to build quality links to a real estate website. I’d be interested in hearing from you about what your link building / online marketing experience has been like? How many of you spend time / money trying to build large quantities of reciprocal links through services or software?

Read part 2:

Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty Part 2 - Tips on successful link building

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