Real Estate Agent and Brokerage Blogs

Good topic, Erin, but can I disagree with a couple points?

Blogrolls are one of the main determiners of quality in Google's blogsearch algorithm. You can read more about this on Bill Slawski's blog:

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=541

Much like any other outbound link, the sites you link to can be an indication of the neighborhood you think your site/blog belongs in. You should have a blogroll and you should include high-quality sites in your niche in it. (It's also a good way of getting noticed, because bloggers are often fanatical about watching who links to them.)

On the topic of Links pages, there's no empirical evidence to support this that I know if, but many search marketers believe you should not have a links page because such a page has too often been used to house off-topic links, reciprocal links, and other low-quality links. But your mileage may vary. :)

And I think it's overstepping to say "Google essentially considers you spam" if you have too many links on a page. (Count the links on amazon.com or target.com, for example.) I think it would be more accurate to say that the spider may choose to ignore links after a certain threshold is reached on a given page -- but the Amazon and Target examples suggest that threshold is set on a site-by-site basis, because those two sites have no trouble getting lots of links crawled.

"The search engines don't like your blogroll."



Really?



"It’s a sweet gesture, but not at the expense of getting your blog banned by Google"

Really?

Then how do you explain the blogroll on the "Official Google Blog"???

By my count, they have a blogroll consisting of 67 links to other Official Google blogs and 87 links to non-Google blogs.



That's a 154 link blogroll. On the official Google blog (that has a Google PR of 8)



Sorry, I don't buy it and would love to hear an explaination of how Goolge can ban a blog for doing exactly what they themselves are doing.

Mary, I didn't intend to mock Erin. I never said I didn't believe Google doesn't like a lot of links on a page. The part I struggled with was the Google not liking blogrolls in general and totality, and banning sites for having them. The fact is, the Official Google blog has a HUGE blogroll. Of course, it's Google, and they can do what they want, but generally speaking they don't ban sites for doing what they themselves practice.

I didn't see anything in the original post about new blogs. I read it as applicable for ALL blogs. I can see getting knocked down a few notches for too many links, but I'm struggling with BANNED for having a blogroll. If anyone can provide proof that a blog has been BANNED simply for having a blogroll (which is what the original post implies to me), then I'll freely, openly, and gladly admit I'm wrong.



I recently moved my own blogroll off the main page to a seperate page, just to free up space. My blog has been around for two years, which is a pretty long time for a RE blog, and it's had a blog roll since day 1. It also ranks pretty well for some very competitive search terms. I agree that a blogroll can be a popularity contest, but I put it there thinking my users might enjoy it. As you're well aware, Goolge's webmaster guidelines say "do it for the visitor, not the search engines" (I'm paraphrasing).



Erin, if you felt I was mocking you, I apologize, that was not my intent.

I have heard this before and neither agree or disagree.  I'm not smart enough.  But I am choosey about the blogs I put on my blog roll.  I like them to be either releveant to my niche or just a page that is well written and entertaining and yet still pertaining to real estate. 

There are probably a few more I would like to add.  But I must say this.  If it were not for blog rolls, there are a lot of great blogs that I read that I might never have found.

I also hope my comment didn't come across as mocking in any way, and apologies if it did.



Real Estate bloggers, whose blogs have been in existence less than a year on average. It is more hurtful than helpful for new bloggers to include a blogroll.



I have to disagree, Erin. There's no documentation anywhere, and it's never been discussed by a search engine rep. to my knowledge, that a blogroll is a bad thing for new bloggers, veteran bloggers, or any blogger.



The primary use of blogrolls in the Real Estate blogosphere is to use it as a popularity contest



Fair enough, but SEO and online marketing is, to a large degree, a popularity contest. Sites/Blogs that do well are the ones that get noticed, which means they're the popular ones -- popularity generally being measured by inbound links, buzz, etc.



Certainly there are right and wrong ways to use a blogroll, and right and wrong ways to link out to other sites, but I don't think that equates to saying it's more hurtful to have a blogroll. Consider SearchEngineLand.com -- it launched in December, a brand new site with no history, no trust, no authority, etc. It immediately had a blogroll (on the home page) listing well over 100 of the most authoritative search marketing sites/blogs. By March it had a PR=7. The blogroll hasn't hurt it one bit.



http://www.metamend.com/google-links.html



There are a lot of misstatements in there. It paints this image of Google as Cruella de Ville or something. :-)



GOOGLE's own documentation for webmasters they state that more than 100 links on a single page is not advised



True, but that's a crawling issue. If you have a site with low trust/authority, your pages will not be spidered as vigorously as possible. It's not an issue of being penalized or banned.

Well over two years ago, I got the idea from Hanan Levin to try to make a list of all the active RE bloggers out there. There weren't many. Instead of intergrating the search onto my mortgage blog, I set up a totally seperate blogger.com blog at reblog.mariah.com. It was nothing but a link fest. I didn't intend it for SEO, but it certainly worked. Every post made was just the name of the blog, a short description, and a link to it. When RE bloggers linked back, I put them in the blogroll over in the right column. 

At one time, there were nearly 200 blogs in the blogroll, all RE related. Many died, and some droped their links so now the roll is around 50. My page rank has actually droped since cleaning up the blogroll, but that could also be because the site is longer updated.

Anyway, if ever google were to look at a blog, and determin it to be spam, this was a perfect example. What is the result? Do a querry on "real estate blogs" to find out. Then do it on Yahoo!. Then consider the blog has been dead since I created REMBEX four months ago.

On lenderama, I just counted 196 links. I reckon about half are outbound, and enjoy a 5 Page Rank.

I have a hard time beleiving excessive linking can hurt you so long as the links are to web pages of value.

Ok, I see your point about domain age. Actually, lenderama sits on mariah.com, created in 1996. But I still have my doubts that blogrolls hurt more than they help. I took a look at your portfolio. The site with the highest PR (4) is yankeeblogswap.com.

Created just last December, this site prominently features 2 blog rolls (one in text and the other in graphics), and contains well over 120 links. Sometimes it links 2 or 3 times to the same outbound blog.

What gives? If you were to tell me this blog might be ranked even higher if it were to curb it's outbound links, I could see that. But it was all that link sharing that helped it become popular in the first place. I bet most of the bloggeers involved would have passed on participation if a link to their blog wasn't offered. There's something to be said for the trade off.