Rand Fiskin over at SEOMoz has been kind enough to explain what it looks like if you have had the Google Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty levied against your real estate website.

I have asked around to find out why the real estate websites were penalized and found my answer. I am going to make an attempt to explain it here with the use of some very crude diagrams.

Below is an example of a naturally occurring reciprocal linking structure.

A Realtor who is interested in truly helping their site visitor would realize when someone is looking for a new home, they are also going to be interested in the schools, hospitals, shopping, etc. Also, you might see that the Realtor links to the school site, the school site might not link back due to 1 reason or another.

Now, lets take a look at the type of reciprocal linking that warranted the Google Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty. I asked the question, “I can’t believe that the penalty is just from participating in reciprocal linking, so is it because of too many reciprocal links in a short period of time, or links from irrelevant sources, etc? Does anyone have any insight as to what the actual infraction was?”

Jay Griffin (cant find a link for Jay or a link to a website of his. Jay, if you read this, send me a link and I will post it for you…) answered a question of mine and stated the following;

The penalty was at first limited to approximately 100 real estate agent sites that are (were) hosted by the same company. On April 15 each of these sites dropped approximately 30-50 positions in rankings. About a week later some of these sites made “re inclusion requests” and subsequently came back in the rankings, some to a lesser degree, about 30 days after that.In the meantime a smaller number of sites that were all built by another company were hit on May 9th. Most of these sites have yet to recover.What these penalized sites shared in common, for the most part, was a directory of state pages that had links to other real estate agents (referral/relocation partners) across the country.These links were compiled in some cases over a period of several years - too many links too fast was not the issue. They were all linking to other agents - not to sites outside of the real estate industry. All told approximately 150 sites (not thousands) have been penalized..

Here is what that looks like…

As you can imagine, I have not added all of the potential link combinations in this diagram. This is a very incestuous reciprocal linking structure that is set up specifically just for manipulating search engine results. Also note that we in Kentucky know all about Incestuous relationships (you have heard all of the jokes… )

This is the basis for Google’s Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty in a nut shell.

Now, this is not applicable to just the real estate industry. I would venture a guess that this is happening in many industries and if your industry is participating in a linking scheme like this one, now is the time to diversify your reciprocal links before you have a penalty levied against your site.

Once again, thanks to Jay Griffin for the explanation and I am going to reply to his posting to tell him I made this blog entry and would like to link to his site as a way of saying thank you.

Editors Note: This trumps the whole Vanessa Fox Insider Ranking Conspiracy Theory bullshit I cooked up yesterday…

Now put on your tinfoil hats folks, because I smell the start of a conspiracy theory of Insider Ranking…

On 5-16-2007 webmasters started posting about removal of credit for reciprocal link accumulation on real estate websites.

On or about 6-6-2007, The SMX diaries Interview with Matt Cutts revealed the discussion about the reciprocal linking penalty against real estate sites and the thread going on at Real Estate Webmasters about this.

On 6-11-2007, this posting was made on seomoz about how to handle a Google Penalty, and an example from the world of Real Estate.

On 6-14-2007, Vanessa Fox announced that she was leaving Google Webmaster Central, and it was also reported on SEOMoz and on Matt Cutts blog on 6-14-2007 as well.

On 6-26-2007 additional postings have been made concerning how it looks to be hit by Google’s Real Estate Reciprocal Link Penalty.

Does anyone know where Vanessa is going when she leaves Google webmaster Central?

Anybody???

The answer is Zillow.com

Anyone want to tell me what Zillow.com is?

Anybody???

From the title and description…

Zillow - Real Estate Valuations, Homes for Sale, Free Real Estate Information

Zillow provides free real estate information including homes for sale, comparable homes, historical sales, home valuation tools and more. Whether you’re a first-time homebuyer, selling a home, agent, broker, buyer of investment property or real estate professional - Get Your Edge in Real Estate at Zillow.com.

Did Vanessa give a 1 month notice then help pave the way to make sure that the new real estate venture turned out profitable by damaging the ranking of competing real estate websites?

Google Sued in Domainer Lawsuit–Vulcan Golf v. Google - This is a new lawsuit in which Google is being sued for allegedly violating trademarks by allowing “typo” domain squatters to monetize with AdSense. A Typosquatter is a group that will register mis-spelled versions of popular domains like;

techorati.com
youtuve.com
gogle.com

I am sure if you type these in, you will be presented with a website. I am not going to glorify their exsistence with a link here….

I have to say that I agree there is a problem with AdSense and I also wrote an article quite some time back asking if Google AdSense was perpetuating Click Fraud with their AdSense for Domains program.

C.A.D. Website Design would like to announce the launch of SubSmartRegistry.com. Roy Williams approached us in January with a revolutionary idea in substitute placement within a school system that is the first product of this nature to hit the market. In what has been deemed the “snowball effect”, SubSmartRegistry is able to build a pool of available substitutes, order them according to a proprietary algorithm and begin initiating contact in order to ensure all substitute positions are filled quickly and with the best qualified substitutes in your district. This system allows for a hands-off approach for a substitute coordinator. Only in the worst case scenario does a substitute coordinator need to actively get involved in placing and confirming substitutes for those teachers who have requested time off. Substitutes not only have the ability to manage their schedule, but through various school and teacher profile information, a substitute will have a chance to become familiar with the schools, teachers and lesson plans before they ever set foot in the front door. Districts have the ability to manage and accurately track all placements in their entire district.

C.A.D. Website Design is proud to launch another project from their growing list of educational institutes, organizations ans businesses. We have now worked on various sites for Johns Hopkins University and sites for University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, TeachersPayTeachers.com (a division of Scholastic) and now SubSmartRegistry.com.

A website that we started working on quite some time ago has finally gone live. The University of Arkansas Pine Bluff has finally been released to the general school population after an exhaustive effort by Beverly Arthur who took the time to populate the CMS we designed with all of the content needed for the college website. We are proud to have been selected for this project, and feel that it is the project that landed the two Johns Hopkins websites that we have been awarded.

I would like to welcome the newest member of our team… “Big D”. Big D joins us from Huntington, WV where he was working doing web development for another company doing their Intra net. Big D brings a host of skill sets to our team including;

Photoshop 5.0 / 5.5 / 6.0 / 7.0 / CS / CS2 / CS3
Adobe ImageReady 7.0 / CS2
Adobe Premiere 6 / 6.5 / Pro 2.0
Adobe After Effects 5.5 / 6.0 / 7.0
Adobe Illustrator
ASP (Active Server Pages)

PHP
Advanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Layout Design
HTML coding
Macromedia Flash 5 / 8 Professional
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 / Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
Install & configure CGI & Perl Scripts

Real Producer Plus & Windows Media Encoder
Experience with Web Streaming Windows Media, QuickTime, & Real Technologies
Video Editing & Motion Graphic Creation Experience on Adobe Premiere / After Effects

Big D is originally from Sri Lanka. We feel that he is an excellent addition to our team here in Kentucky, but we have to work on his favorite sports teams because he doesn’t bleed blue just yet….

For years pictures from the various satellite image providers like Google and Microsoft have been passed around the web. Funny pictures, pictures of Area 51 and even crop circles have made their way to inboxes around the world and sites like Fark.com. With the lauch of Google’s Street View we often get intimate snap shots of everyday happenings and those not so everyday. There are already sites setup to track and log these ‘Easter Eggs’ and all of them are worth checking them out.

Check out:
http://www.streetviewr.com/
http://battellemedia.com/archives/003680.php
http://www.mapmole.com/

A great deal of discussion has taken place over White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO. It’s a really old debate actually. “Should I try this new thing they call ‘Google Bombing’?” is an age old question that still pops up from time to time. Does one simply focus on proper html structure, content and a solid link foundation? Should I tempt fate and try the newest cloaking technique I just read about? What about this request for a link exchange? Am I getting involved in an honest link exchange or am I’m getting involved with some low life making a fortune off of link farms?

Truth be told, most sites employ some sort of mixture of both tactics, often deemed Gray Hat SEO. Gray hat could be anything from a creative CSS and JavaScript combination that keeps relevant text in the top of the code yet displays it at the bottom of the page, all the way to down to a mild cloaking scheme. Have you ever heard of sIFR. To me, it is by far one of the most thoughtful, creative and under-utilized ideas available for a web designer. It allows the graphic designer and the SEO specialist to get along a little better. To be honest though, it dips its toe into the shallow end of the gray hat pool. Does that stop me from using it? Never.

So how far are we to go towards the dark side before we go full blown black hat? Do we strive for a Yoda-esque style of righteousness or do we follow Anakin’s footsteps by destroying all that is good only to ask for forgiveness once we have been banned by likes of the imperialistic Google?

At heart, I’m a philosopher and that’s how I got into web development believe it or not. A simple “if” statement isn’t a far cry from my introductory symbolic logic classes. Descartes is often referred to when talking about the first Matrix movie or incorrectly quoted as writing “I think therefore I am”, but he was also a master of deduction. His way of thinking always seems to find its way into my problem solving. I tend to strip problems, and even code, down to what I know works, assume everything else is an error (the evil genius) waiting to happen and then fix it from the ground up.

So when looking at SEO techniques, how do we decided how far we can take it? Machiavellian SEO practices are out of the question. Full blown deception and manipulation is sure fire way to get kicked out of search engine indexes everywhere. Unfortunately we all can’t be the uber-sites Nietzsche forecast. Kant would suggest we follow Google’s wishes and build a site and links as-if the web was some utopia void of corruption that is driven by a set of standards that everyone practices. Even Google doesn’t truly enforce its own standards.

Where does that leave us? Truly white or black hat practices aren’t going to achieve the success most of us desire. Most of us would benefit from floating in the gray hat practices of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism. We should try to make as many parties happy as possible. We should strive for the common good. Show the search engines what they need to see and at the same time present the visitor with the information they are looking for and customer retention will rise. If you cloak your site, visitors will arrive through Yahoo, Google or MSN and realize you weren’t what they were truly searching.

Content Re-publication/Syndication

There are plenty of misconceptions out there that prevent people from truly succeeding. We offer a product called RSStatic that comes in both a free and licensed version. I’ve written about this before, but basically is publishes content on your site from RSS or other XML feeds. Once a week I get an email asking me if this will get them in trouble for having duplicate content. Then I have to explain what duplicate content is truly about. I have to explain that there is very big difference between duplicate content and content syndication. Services like moreover wouldn’t be in existence if this were the case. Google News works because of duplicate content. How many sites republish the same AP article? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

Link Building

RSStatic brings me to another point. There has been claim after claim about building links too fast. People are afraid that if too many incoming links show up out of nowhere, that they’re going to get a penalty. Search Google for ‘php forum’. As of the writing of this post, there are 376 million results. The #1 listing is phpbb.com. Most people know what it is, but if you don’t, it’s a free forum script. When you install the forum on your site, instantly you site will have a bunch of new pages with a link at the bottom pointing to http://www.phpbb.com. If you do things right and start a few forum threads to get the ball rolling, phpbb.com will suddenly have a few extra hundred incoming links. And that would just be from your site. RSStatic goes through the same process. Massive amounts of links can be directed at a site and no one gets in trouble. So to this I say, offer something free for people to put on their site. If you sell candles, offer a site counter that looks like a candle burning and make sure your link is at the bottom. If you sell a script, offer a stripped down free version. If you have some sort of online competition, offer a the code for a “Vote For Me” banner and encourage people to use it. HotorNot.com made its fortune by doing this. Paypal rose up from the shackles of eBay by implementing their buy now buttons on personal websites.

Hidden Text ,CSS and HTML Structure

This is the biggest myth out there. A talented web developer can work wonders with CSS layers and text. You can browse WebMasterWorld and WebProWorld and read the fear in people’s hearts over hiding anything. Sure, white text on a white background is going to get you nailed. But a savvy developer can work wonders hiding text and navigation for honest practical purposes. View the source on UAPB.edu and pay attention to the left hand navigation. Viewing through a browser and all you see is the top level <ul><li> structure. With the right CSS and a little javascript, you’ve hidden text from the visitor and set up a nice mouseover effect. Hidden Text? Yup. It can work and it is safe. Beyond simply hiding text is html structure. Most algorithms look at things from the top down. They assume that the closer text or the h1 tag is to the beginning of the code, the more important it must be. Those same elements might not be what you want your visitors to think is the most important. This is the beauty of layers. With the proper CSS, you can place the first paragraph of text in your code at the bottom of the visual output. You can put the last h3 tag in the code at the top of the page visually.

Google gets what it wants, your visitor gets what they want. Utilitarian SEO - As many people as possible are content. Deceptive? You bet, but aren’t you reading this because you are interested in learning a few gray hat techniques?