RealTown's RealTalk

l estate - link exchange request
 

Hello,
 

My name is ....., I am a Realtor from .......
 

I wanted to request a link from your website to ours.
 

I have already added a link to
http://www.jimclauser.com
 

on our Athens GA Real Estate page located at:
......
 

Your link is currently placed on our site as shown below:
I have a question for Real Talk. I get these link exchange (see below)
requests from time to time. I typically treat them as spam and delete them.
Sometimes I click on the link to see if it's a actual real estate site or
not, but still don't respond.
 

Should I exchange links with these sites? I replaced there information
with ...... To protect the guilty or innocent!
 

Jim Clauser
Your Real Estate Consultant For Life
RE/MAX Associates Athens, Inc.
706-714-1181 Direct
706-433-0542 Fax
http://www.JimClauser.com to view over 3000 homes!
mailto:Jim@JimClauser.com
Check out my Blog at
http://www.VisitJimsBlog.com
 

Location of link: .....................
Address: http://www.jimclauser.com
Title: Athens, Watkinsville and Colbert Georgia real estate listings, home
buying, selling and relocation information - NUMBER1EXPERT(tm)
Description: Athens, Watkinsville and Colbert real estate and homes for
sale in Georgia, new construction and condos - Jim Clauser, REALTOR. -
NUMBER1EXPERT Pop-Up Window" WIDTH="89" HEIGHT="21"> All agents ar
 

If reciprocal linking is also part of your strategy, please e-mail us the
location of the link back to our site on your site. We will then make you a
Link Partner on the Las Vegas NV Real Estate page which will give you
permanent placement on our site. We can only do that if you e-mail us back
that you have linked back with the location of the reciprocal link.
 

Our link information:
 

URL: ................
Title: Las Vegas Real Estate
 

Description below the URL:
 

Again, thank you very much for this opportunity.
 

Best Regards.
.............
almag@lasvegaswebofhomes.com
 

P.S. Your link is important to us. All links on our site are a maximum of
3 clicks from our home page for maximum benefits to you when the search
engines spider our site. Please e-mail us a confirmation link of our site at
yours when possible.
 

..

Jim Clauser said:
"Should I exchange links with these sites? I replaced there
information with ...... To protect the guilty or innocent!"

Jim,

Some insight, from someone who has managed hundreds of reciprocation
campaigns, since 1998....

If you did not have a link exchange page on your site, then I'd agree
that unsolicited email for link exchange is just spam. But you do
have a link exchange directory, here:
http://www.jimclauser.com/r_link-partners-real-estate-homes.asp

Essentially, you are making a public invitation to exchange links
with other real estate related sites. So, when someone takes you up
on the offer, and they are a legitimate, worthy site, then
reciprocating with them is beneficial to both of you. I'd suggest
that if you do not want to do this, then remove the offer.

For many years, most of the top ranking sites in local real estate
markets have used reciprocation very effectively to build their link
popularity. All it takes is a look around the results. Phoenix, for
instance. The top rankings sites in most of the competitive markets
have been (and still are) reciprocators, but other link building
methods are emerging, like blogroll exchanges.

Many SEO types like to propose that free, one-way, non-reciprocal
links are just ready for the taking, if you put up what they call
"great content". This is complete and total bunk. Gratuitous,
unsolicited links based on "great content", for the average agent, is
mostly an SEO fantasy, perpetrated by the handful of people who get
them.

Occasionally, it happens, and those rare examples keep this naive SEO
myth alive. People also win lotteries. Be aware that the agents that
get free, unsolicited, gratuitous links to their sites generally
write content that is industry-wide in scope, they work very hard to
generate it, and then they actively "promote" it to other agents.
They invariably spend a LOT of time on this.

Blogrolling and SocNet links are emerging as a viable, competitive
link source, but, like link directory reciprocation, they are not
"free" and they do not come without some "forcing the issue". You
have to exert some work to get them. Blogrolling for link exchanges
are essentially no different link directory reciprocation. The
mechanism to do it is slightly different, but the SEO effect is the
same.

If an agent wants to compete for rankings, and needs links, then they
will have to do *something* to get them. The most simple thing to do
is offer to swap links.

Jim, if I were you, I'd take up the legitimate offers to exchange
links. You are already asking for them, publicly, on your site. Links
are the currency of the Web. Right now, to be honest, you are wasting
that currency.

On a much more practical level, I often ask other agents who are in
your situation, where else will your links come from, if you deny
these? To date, the link building alternatives that are put forward
are long on hope, but quite lean in practice.

Best regards,

Dirk Johnson
Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
djohnson@domaindrivers.com
703-406-4698
http://domaindrivers.realtown.com
We're an approved RealTalk/RealTown vendor:
http://DomainDrivers.InternetCrusade.com

Hi Jim,

I spent a lot of time building about 75 exchange pages some years ago. They have since been completely removed since google does not seem to like them. I don't feel it was a waste of time because I believe it helped us at the beginning.

I responded to one person but generally these are automatically sent by link exchange systems so I just ignore them.

Malcolm Waring, Realtor, e-PRO
Pocono Real Estate

Hi, ALL;

Malcolm is correct and he ought to know. Over 80% of his sales come from his website. He is also a client of ours.

Reciprocal links are passe and have been for years now. The reason is simple: incoming links used to be valued as well as outgoing. Once Google and others figured out these reciprocal linking farms, they removed the value of outbound vs. inbound links by cancelling one for the other in their "ranking". For over a year, now, ranking is dead as a duck in an Asian restaurant: your "page rank" means nothing unless you are a seller of advertising.

The ONLY links that do you any real permanent good and that bear no risk of retaliation from search engines for violating their rules against recipracol linking are inbound quality relevant links. Links from things like media sources, directories, publications authority sources and the like.

Google changes their algorithm dozens of times or more in a year. Recipracol links have not been in their algorithm for over 18 months. Look it up. Recipracol links are 2005 technology, designed to beat true authority websites. They were caught, and devalued. They will not do you any permanent good and might do you severe permanent harm. That's your call to make, but we advise against such programs.

Hi Everyone;

I spoke to the head of our IT Department, and here is what he had to say:

"While Google is usually cryptic in its responses, it says pretty much right here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-link-based-popularity.html

'To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.'

This says that exchanged links are frowned upon.

This has been the case for nearly a half-decade; just 3½ years ago, one major real estate website company had to hire on outside SEO strategists to help protect it against quickly falling rankings due to its failed link exchange campaigns on nearly 45,000 clients.

We have thousands of sites that we monitor performance on, on an ongoing basis. Because of that, we are able to see which strategies work, and which ones do not. I can tell you that surely as anything else, exchanging links not only does not help, but most often harms the websites ranking. The reason behind this is simple: email campaigns which promise links in exchange for others often renege on their commitment to link back to your site. This leads us into a situation where our client sends an outbound link to another site, "bleeding" some weight to the targeted site, while receiving none in return. This is a 100% bad scenario and helps only the "scamming" site. In the best-case scenario, they link to a more popular site, then the more popular site links to them (and thousands of others), giving a very small percentage of the total possible outbound weight to our client, as it is shared amongst everyone being linked to.

Bottom line, as has been stated for years by those in the know-link exchanges are bad. They are not good, the odds are not in your favor, and more often than not, you will not receive the promised inbound link. Even if you do-it will only help to minimize the negative effects of this type of campaign. It is time to start learning from the major mistakes of others, time to start listening to what the search engines are stating they are looking for… because believe it or not-sometimes they're pretty up-front about it-and it's time to start building the right way, organically, and with powerful one-way links."

Caroline Wethington wrote -

"This says that exchanged links are frowned upon.

This has been the case for nearly a half-decade; just 3½ years ago, one major real estate website company had to hire on outside SEO strategists to help protect it against quickly falling rankings due to its failed link exchange campaigns on nearly 45,000 clients."

She goes on...

"... I can tell you that surely as anything else, exchanging links not only does not help, but most often harms the websites ranking."

-------------------------

Believe what you want, but it simply isn't true. And I know my top ranking web clients would disagree with you too.

First off, the problem 3 1/2 years ago was not with link exchanging per se. It was with creating a "link farm" - there is a HUGE difference. Google (and the other search robots) knows where your web site lives - the actual web host and it's IP address. In this incident, the web site company was creating a "link farm" by getting existing clients to exchange links "In house" with other existing clients of theirs on the exact same web servers. It really doesn't take much talent or any work to seek out link exchange partners when all of them are with the same company!

And I think you are misreading what Google is saying, "...keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice." Hmm... Search engines reward work on your content that brings in or lures natural links given by choice. Guess what? They always have. So this is not new. But it doesn't say who is choosing to give those links. And if your web site is good, it should naturally attract others where exchanging links will be beneficial to both sides.

Google's best advice was given a little further up. "Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the visitors and drives more qualified traffic to your site."

It is nice to think that a simple real estate agent site will earn "natural backlinks", but that just isn't always realistic. Certainly we may add links to outside sites that would be of interest to our real estate visitors - public school sites, local government sites, pubic transportation sites, etc. - giving those other sites "natural backlinks" from us. But you can't really expect those types of sites to give or have a "natural backlink" back to you. What to do? That is where legitmate link exchanging with other good, quality sites can and does work... and it has since the beginning of the Web.

Look at Google's own Quality Guidelines -

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• 
   
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• 
   
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

And as to link schemes, Google explains -

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

So Google has clearly told everyone how to do this properly to satisfy them as well as your visitor. These guidelines again are not anything new! But no where does it say that exchanging links is bad. It only says that excessive reciprocal link exchanging can be harmful to your site.

Feel free to contact me with any questions. I have been building real estate web sites for 14 years.

Win

************************
Win Singleton, CRB, e-PRO
Summit Web Design
(703) 536-7631
wins@summitweb.com
http://Summitweb.InternetCrusade.com
an Internet Crusade Approved Vendor
"Custom web site design that gets results!"
************************

@Win provides these items from Google to support his position that link exchanges are not bad:

"And as to link schemes, Google explains -

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ('Link to me and I'll link to you.')"

Maybe I'm misunderestimating the issue, but it seems to me that the two points above are exactly what we are talking about here.

I do have a few hand picked reciprocal links, but they are mainly local businesses that I have personally spoken to, and we agree that the links would be beneficial to our users. This is pretty much what they tell you on SEO 101 and elsewhere. I also have the inevitable one way outbound links to the local schools. Those obviously give me negative link love but how else can I give out school information? Heck, we can't even talk about schools and the clients don't really understand why.

When we first set up the website a few years ago I built this huge framework of pages for link exchange and called them referral pages. Kathleen Allardyce got me started with the basic pages and true to my personal style I took it to the extreme with one or more pages for each state. I had to personally scour the web looking for quality websites for each state (and even international) and I even hired a guy to help with the grunt work. I got about half way through the alphabet and Kathleen warned me about the google changes so I stopped putting more work into it. It really did work at the time though because we went from page nowhere up to page three. I didn't take them down for about another year but finally removed them all.

Anyway, I personally feel the issue for real estate web sites is really a grey area or the penalties would be worse. I mean think about it, even with 75 pages of Realtor website links, how is this NOT a legitimate use for referrals? I'm new in this business but both sides of my family have been in it for years so I know enough about the value of referrals. Why should this be different from a personal referral network?

That was a loaded question that brings me back to my orginal point. It's NOT a personal referral network. We create those link exchange pages SPECIFICALLY to (1.) manipulate Page Rank and they are also explicitly set up with the rule of (2.) "link to me and I'll link to you."

Now obviously I didn't accept any of the many non-RE link requests (gambling sites and bad neighborhood sites) but it still falls too close to the above rules so I don't do it anymore.

Malcolm Waring, Realtor, e-PRO
Pocono Real Estate

Malcolm Waring said:
"Now obviously I didn't accept any of the many non-RE link requests
(gambling sites and bad neighborhood sites) but it still falls too
close to the above rules so I don't do it anymore."
 

Hi Malcolm,
 

I really don't like to stir this reciprocal pot again, but I do need
to provide some seasoned, experienced input to this discussion. The
SEO world is full of mythology about this subject, most of it coming
from people who do not do it.
 

Of course, since we're taking about the SEO industry, knowledge of
the subject and first-hand experience are not required to put forward
a theory. In the SEO world, you can literally say anything, make a
convoluted logic argument for your case, and get someone, somewhere
to agree. If enough people agree with your theory, it becomes "common
knowledge" and unchallengeable by those in the "know".
 

I've been in this business for ten years. I discount most of what I
hear from the "SEO gurus", and I consider the vast majority of them
to be, at best, confused and full of self-promotional chatter, to put
it as graciously as I can. Celebrity status in the SEO world has
virtually no bearing on SEO skill, but it has a lot to do with
promotional ability.
 

First, let me start by saying that, if you do not want to reciprocate
to get links, then, by all means, do not do it.
 

But if you take the time to look at real search rankings in
competitive markets, you will find, again and again and again, that
the top ranking sites are reciprocating, many using the old
tried-and-true link directories. I do want to note that the latest
gambit is with blogroll link reciprocation, and many
anti-reciprocation pundits willingly exchange blogroll links. Go
figure. Link exchange is link exchange, regardless of the mechanism.
 

Now, anyone can say that reciprocation does not work, but a simple
review of Google rankings refutes that position, quite definitively.
The anti-recip theories melt way. I can name, by memory, the
top-ranking reciprocating sites in most of the top metro markets in
this country. That is because we've been actively exchanging links
with them for years.
 

Now, if you build a closed-circle "link club" of some kind, you just
might get whacked. That has happened. No need to revisit that subject
right now.
 

But, by and large, Google respects the right of business owners to
link to and from whoever they deem appropriate, within reason. That
is a fundamental web marketing tenet that precludes every single
search engine, and it precludes Google by 5 years. Gracious
reciprocation is among the very original methods of promoting a
website.
 

Again, anyone can choose, personally, to not reciprocate with anyone
else. It is a personal choice, and it takes two independent website
owners to complete the transaction.
 

My only question is this, for real estate site owners that refuse to
reciprocate... where will the links come from? In small markets, not
many links are necessary, so a few blog links here and there might do
the trick. In large competitive markets, many established already
competitors have hundreds of links. Some over one thousand.
 

Standing on the sidelines in that situation and listening to the
noise coming from various self-appointed SEO gurus who advise against
reciprocation will not earn them any links. In fact, it will likely
get them further behind, every day, unless they are very actively
blgorolling.
 

Here at DomainDrivers, we are constantly looking for new and
meaningful sources of links for our clients. We are not "married" to
reciprocation. We do it because it works, in real search results, and
it has worked, consistently, for years. We have the results to prove
it.
 

So, to keep pace with the market, we're adding services like our Blog
Comment Assistant, which allows site owners the efficient means to
get blogroll links in a huge way. Please see our website home page
for more info.
 

Malcolm, I am not trying to be defiant with you, just straightforward
and honest, from someone who does this every day.
 

For every SEO theory, there's another opinion. What really matters is
what takes place in real search results. That's why we tend to ignore
SEO gurus, and look at results for our own guidance. It is revealing
to do that. Especially in large metro areas.
 

From what we see, the bulk of real estate links for most
well-ranking agents still come from directory-to-directory
reciprocation, with various blogging link methods next (but gaining
ground quickly), followed by social network links. (MySpace,
LinkedIn,etc). Buying a YAHOO listing appears to be worthwhile.
 

The worst link advice of all, but again, popular within some SEO
circles is the "build great content and you'll get hundreds of links"
gambit. Yes, there are always the occasional anomalies and exceptions
that prove that it works, but the exceptions are usually not
duplicatable by others, and thus, rather useless as valid link
"advice" for most agents.
 

Most agents that get those "great content citation" links in large
quantities usually spend most of their day, every day, first writing,
then promoting, their content. They are actually publishers, with
links as their currency. It's one way to go. But it is not really
duplicatable, and it's certainly not a valid strategy for an SEO
advisor who needs to get a client ranked, within a limited budget.
 

And what works amazingly well in small markets is usually rather
ineffective in large ones, if it is constrained to popular,
limited-scope, SEO theories. So I'd advise that anyone in a large
metro market use caution if they taking their SEO advice from a
successful agent in a small one who tells them adamantly to tie one
hand behind their back and get out there and compete! I see that all
the time on other forums.
 

Again, Malcom, I respect your choices. I have seen agents get to the
top of the rankings using all manner of methods. If it works for you,
the all the better.
 

Our way here is by no means the only way. It's just one of many ways,
but at an affordable price. We serve a marketplace for SEO services.
 

Agents who do their SEO work themselves can invest as much time in it
as they see fit. But the real "cost" of that can be extraordinary, in
man hours, and nobody would ever pay a vendor to do the same. There's
a learning curve, as well. DIY SEO is not for everyone, and really,
it is not for most agents.
 

This is a discussion board, where a full airing of the alternative
thinking is encouraged. Mine are just some thoughts on the subject
from a very different perspective.
 

I'd just advise that you consider that not all SEO theory is valid,
regardless of the source. It always sounds good on paper, but much of
it fails to hold water with real search rankings. That is most
certainly the case with reciprocation and real estate.
 

Best regards,
 

Dirk Johnson
Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
djohnson@domaindrivers.com
703-406-4698
http://domaindrivers.realtown.com
We're an approved RealTalk/RealTown vendor:
http://DomainDrivers.InternetCrusade.com

Hi Win,