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…

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under CAD Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.