Just Say No to Reciprocal Linking

It's been understood for several years now that blatant reciprocal linking in an effort to manipulate search engine rankings is a big no-no and will get real estate websites penalized harshly. I only bring this up because I am repeatedly asked by clients if I think it's a good idea to set up a link page so friends and associates and random strangers can exchange links with them because linking is good right? Well reciprocal linking was okay pre-2007, but many real estate websites that normally ranked well for keywords starting getting penalized because of "link pages."  These are pages that are dedicated to "relocation partners" but the only real partnering that is going on is an attempt to swap link juice.

Obviously as a Realtor, you're going to have legitimate relationships with other Realtors where you may want to reference them as a local expert in say...Tallahassee. The tricky part is to determine where Google draws the line. Is five outbound links to other real estate websites okay... maybe ten or fifteen or do they give a grace card to anything under fifty? As usual Matt Cutts and the rest of the spam squad do not give exact numbers but general guidelines.

If you are determined to trade links with someone, at least find someone with a website that ranks better than yours because it doesn't do a whole lot of good to swap links with a website that doesn't rank for anything. If you plow ahead with this be warned as one SEO'er said, "don't come crying to me when you're site gets banished, unless your tears are made of diamonds, in which case you can cry into my pocket."

Truly, the best way (and least likely to cause banishment) to get inbound links to your site and work on real estate SEO is by blogging on sites like ActiveRain (using strategic anchor text that points to optimized pages) and leaving meaningful comments on others blogs with do-follow links. Squidoo, HubPages and Ezine Articles are other tried and true methods of creating quality in-bound links. Of course there are other methods that require varying levels of effort and expertise. To wrap it up, in-bound links are important, (to varying degrees depending on algorithm shifts) one-way links are by far the ideal and if you are solidly set on swapping links with a few associates, don't be a knucklehead and shout it out to the search engines by naming that page "links."