Hi Paul,

Respectfully, you do not seem to have 500 links that "count".

I just ran a link report on your domain using the very comprehensive LinkSurvey.com tool. It shows 198 total links, the bulk of which are from within your own domain.

Your actual number of links from unique domains, (excluding your own site) is the number that matters with respect to SEO issues. You seem to have about a dozen unique domains pointing back to your site.

Thousands of links from a single domain is immaterial to the engines. They learned long ago that people can do all kinds of things to get multiple links from the same domain. The list is long. Affiliate links, paid links, postings, etc.  People have tried, again and again.

So, hundreds of blog comments and posts here on ActiveRain equals ONE link in Google's eyes.

Occasionally, an agent in a very low competition market will get some rankings based on some modest posting. That is due to the lack of competition, not the forum(s) they are using.

In high competition markets, like Phoenix, posting endlessly in ActiveRain will do very little to affect their rankings. In the end, it's ONE link. In markets like Phoenix, they need to do what the well-ranking sites do. They need to get links from a LOT of unique domains.

Just trying to help explain this...Thx

Paul,

We base everything we do on the analysis of real search results. We do not use raw SEO theory, much of which is just plain wrongheaded. SEO theory often sounds good "on paper", but it also usually fails to hold upt to close scrutiny in real search resutls.

After ten years of doing this, we feel that real search results analysis is the only thing that sheds any light on proper SEO strategy.    

Here's a post to that effect that may help explain:
Why SEO "theory" is usually worthless