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AA Penalty Over!

It appears that the real estate websites from Advanced Access that were hit with a penalty may be back in good favor from Google. Congratulations to all that were affected by this penalty and if you still have reciprocal links from other real estate agents, you might consider that a warning from Google to remove them. Now that the AA sites have returned, I can only hope that my Atlanta Real Estate website won't be far behind. AA was not the only company affected by the latest from Google and I was one of the others. Hopefully and with any luck my site won't be far behind.

Do you still attempt to increase your rankings by reciprocating links with other real estate websites? I did. Not anymore. I removed every reciprocal link to agents and you should consider doing the same - especially if you are a high ranking website in your city. You never know if they are still looking for more sites and you never know if one of your competitors might report your site to Google.

As for those of you who don't think this was a penalty - fine. Good luck and I hope what happened to the many of us who were affected doesn't happen to you. To every one who has returned to their previous rank, Congrats!

Posted by Ryan Ward on 05/23/2007 12:38 PM

Comments (7)

atlanta real estate, google penalty

7 Comments on AA Penalty Over!

MAY

2007

Hi Ryan, what happened recently was not a penalty from Google, Google does not have the power to delete your site from the entire web, all that will happen is low page rank, web site placement, etc. They also do not have the power to make your page not sure up by typing in the URL, so trust me this has nothing to do with a "penalty"

Reciprocal links are still a VERY good idea, as long as you swap links with other real estate relateted web site. Don't be afraid of the links trust me :)

Hi Michael, these sites weren't deleted from the web. They were penalized on the Google search engine only. It was a 30 day penalty by all counts. Let me point you to the best source on this subject from a number of people:

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread15141.html

These sites were specifically picked because of reciprocal linking with other real estate sites in an effort to "game" the system and achieve afrtificially increased search results. I was selected as well. It was, as best as anyone can tell not handled with an algorthm, but a hand edit instead.

Nevertheless, these websites are back to their previous placement and I am hoping that mine will be in the next couple of weeks as well.

I will just have to disagree that reciprocal links are a good idea...I have pesonal experience with that NOT being the case.

Ryan I thought you were referring to the recent AA outage (all sites are not working the past 2 days) was because of the reciprocal links

As far as the 30 day ban - I do reciprocal links and I was #1 the whole time this so called ban happened, so not sure how this ban had anything to do with trading links with other real estate only sites with relevant content. I saw a drop on Yahoo once but I read somewhere the techs at AA spoke to someone at Yahoo and resolved it.

No this was different than what happened the other day. This took place for the AA sites on April 17th. My site was hit about two weeks later along with many others. There doesn't appear to have been to much rhyme or reason to the selected sites that were penalized. It really was to get the word out that Google does not want to see websites "game" their algorithm by artificially acquiring links for the purpose to increase rankings. Trust me, this thing has been rough for me. My website is about 7 months old and I was #3 on Google for "atlanta real estate" and all of the associated terms. Now I am in the 40's. I simply hope that I am given the same opportunity to get my rakings back as well. It was a tedious process - removing links, notifyinf partners and then submitting a reinclusion request with Google to have them remove the penalty.

There is a strong likelihood that they will continue to go after more real estate websites engaged in "grey-hat" linking practices such as this in the future. They have and will continue to reduce the strength of reciprocal linking in their algorithm because of artificial rankings from the intentional reciprocal linking issues...

JUL

2007

Over 2 years later, Advanced Access sites are STILL in the Yahoo sand-box!

JUL

2007

Thank you for the update. It seems scary out there in cyberspace if you don't know what you are doing.

MAR

2008

Well the key is you can't run around changing things all the time. Build a great site with good traffic. I'm not sure if changing everything is anything other that restting for Google.

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