Thanks for the great info here ( again and always ). For some time now I have been struggling with my web site and its non-ranking. It is a template site from Alamode and I did re-write all of or most all of the content on the pages. I have had the site for about 2-3 years and was only ranking about a 2 on Google. Parlty I beleve because I had not changed the content for the first 1 1/2 years.

I then changed the old url to the current one back in February. I then began to add new content. I am being crawled every few days or so but still show no ranking even though the site has been submitted and verified.

I hope that I possibly may find something here in your article that will help me in my quest to be found.

Any additional suggestions?

I was part of the group with John Sabia that was hand penalized by Google for excessive reciprocal linking and multiple state pages. Matt Cutts told Rand over at SEOMOZ.org in a video interview that Google does not like the practice and will do more penalizing.

This site was penalized - Sarasota, Fl real estate

This site ranks very well for numerous search phrases and provides a good amount of business for me as a Realtor. 60 days was very tough. The pipeline dries up when you rely on good Google rankings for your business. If you are ranking well and rely on your good rankings for business don't take a chance.

I have since created another site just in case I get in trouble again. I would rather only work on one site but for safety reasons will get another one going just in case.

If you really want to read a lot about the recent Google penalties you can visit realestatewebmasters dot com or activerain dot com and do a search for the subject. There is tons of information out there but the gist of it all has been provided nicely in this post

I was part of the ignorant group doing the reciprocal link trick a few years ago on our static page (with Advanced Access).  As the time AA recommended the reciprocal links and when I started reading rumors abour being penalized I deleted all the pages and was never penalized.

I think it goes back to hiring a web designer/marketing expert that knows what they are doing and worry about their customers' well being. 

I think you would agree that a lot of us want to focus on our business and don't know much about SEO and about the ever changing "Internet Rules".

I have complete confidence that if I am ever doing something wrong with my RSS site, you guys would knock on my door and tell me about it.

Ines,

I am committed to keeping our clients blogs safe and aligned with search engines ever changing algorithms.  However, I also know that you are now a very saavy real estate blogger and SEO expert that would never exchange links again! 

Hey, my family and I will be in Miami tomorrow, give me a ring on my cell.  I'd love to hook up!

Mary: With one of the sites I am running, I am looking for a coder but my idea is to create a directory of local businesses and rate them. If they have an online site, I am linking to them online and proving a rating system. I hope they exchange links with me in return if they are rated favorably, but would running a site like that penalize me and my other pages like the blog I have to go with the site offing say shopping tips, etc?

PS: Where do we sign up at on this blog? I am hoping if we signed up we could type our user name and password fast as typing my ame, email and site is getting a bit time consuming considering how i leave 3 or 4 comments a day.

John,

I apologize if you took offense to the choice of words and I have changed some of the language in this article, however, Rand does clearly refer to you as a "gray hat."  To quote him exactly, "However, John's a reformed gray hat turned white and knows quite a bit more about the world of SEO than he did prior to Google's shot across the bow for reciprocal linking."

Mary - I think I 'm clear on the dangers of linking on blogrolls however is it ok to site blog's articles by other realtors? and is it beneficial to do so or are their linking risks for that too? - this linking stuff is so confusing.

I recently was reading on Technorati Authority and it apprears that your "authority" comes from other's citing your work - i.e.  a post - is that not accomplished via linking to the post? 

I appreciate your insights and have heard nothing but rave reviews about you and your team - I think I may have an RSS pieces blog in my future :-)  

I've heard over and over that blogrolls do very little for ranking, especially considering a link from Alaska to an Orlando RE site doesn't tell Google very much. I don't have a blogroll (except the mybloglog widget), so if I want to link with anoher blog, I just do a post about them. It just seems that devoting a small paragraph with strong keywords is much more effective for telling Google what that link is about.

Just this week my blog was flagged by Google as a "spam blog".  I am unable to post new posts on it.

I did a series of 3 posts on my 25 favorite online marketing sites for Realtors.  Links to each site...  I guess that is a no-no?

I submitted a request to the Gods that be, and hopefully they're going to get me back and able to post again soon.

Maybe it's time for me to find a different blogging platform than Google's blogger.

Jeff

Wow! I didn'y know that. I think my blog has more than twenty recoprocal links. But I've never engaged with any farm links or anything like that.  All those links are done manually, bloggers that I met as times passed by.

I guess maybe I'm using Blog*Spot, Google's baby but, after reading your post I'm getting worried. I worked very hard to get a PR4 for this blog and I don't want it to be busted by Google or any other search engines for that matter.

You got a new reader in me. I shall be reading and watch over this blog to know more SEO.

Greetings and lotta loves from Malaysia.

Many thanks to all of you for this blog.  There's a ton of good info here that I had not been aware of.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

Although I agree with some of the posts, in todays competitive market, without an online presence, and a 1st page ranking for your keywords or kw terms...you may have problems.

I was reading through the post and found it interesting because my site www.Ocean30.com was one of the sites that was impacted with John and Marcs sites along with several of my local colleagues.  The part of the situation that I was most suprised by was one of the sites that was impacted had the state pages created for linking but had never created even the first link between sites. All of the sites incoming links were from their REW and Active Rain blogs.  The fact that it was impacted for the same timeframes that the other sites that were clearly indicated to me that once Google started they were looking at any of the REW sites that state pages.  I know that it was only a small percentage of the sites that were penalized.  The result was that each of us became much more aware of the potential downsides of recip. linking.

Probably the worst part of the whole deal was that the sites that place highest in our market were all engaged in recip. linking and only a few of us were impacted.  We of course removed our state link pages and stopped the practice - the websites that continued to build links have still not been negatively impacted.

Our current efforts are split between adding content to our websites on a regular basis and working on our blogs.  Thanks for creating the resource that you have. 

Glad to find you again after so long from AR.

Great Site I enjoyed reading this blog on rsspieces I was told to build linking on my website www.YouSellTomorrow.com by my webmaster but havent done it so far i think a few links relating to my site would be good, but now im not sure?

Thanks for the content you give.