Comments on: White Hat SEO for Real Estate Blogging and the Reciprocal Link

By: seo news

seo news — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:03:28 +0000

Thanks for the sharing of such information. we will pass it on to our readers. This is a great reading. Thanking you. seo news

By: Portland Real Estate

Portland Real Estate — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:58:28 +0000

Very good point. I have been spending time making sure that the visitors are getting an easy, pretty, and informational visit to my website. Trying to please Google the whole time would not necessarily make me a nice website that my clients will feel comfortable using.

By: Seo web design

Seo web design — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:00:47 +0000

I practice SEO and provide services related, this is the first time I have run into info on real estate SEO SEM content like this. Most material out there is about generating leads in general.
It’s great to see someone take on this particular niche, realtors should know about SEM SEO and PPC to flourish online.
Great share, thanks
Maurice

By: Chris Hotz

Chris Hotz — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:13:47 +0000

Hey Rob,
Thanks for the comment.
I definitely recommend visiting other blogs and leaving value oriented comments; similar to the comment you just left hear. Leaving a comment that adds value, asks good questions or even creates a bit of ‘good’ controversy will attract readers to your blog wanting to learn more about you.
Regarding the ‘no follow’ tag I see a lot of bloggers removing these from their website. Some links deserve a ‘no follow’ tag and some don’t. Here is why…
What’s a ‘no follow’ tag:
A ‘no follow’ tag prevents search engines from following a link to their location (whether it’s 3rd party or internal link).
Why remove it?
I guess bloggers are removing their ‘no follow’ tags as an act of good faith hoping others will remove their ‘no follow’ tag, thereby allowing search engine to follow the links within comments going to the commentors site. This does not help the blog with out the ‘no follow’ tag but the commentors leaving comments on that site. Make sense?
Why Keep the ‘No Follow’ tag?
Some pages on your site are more important than other pages. You want search engine’s to find those important pages more quickly and often than less important pages. Using a ‘no follow’ tag for links pointing to the less important pages and removing the ‘no follow’ tag from links pointing to more useful pages will help SE’s find the more useful pages on your sites quickly without distracting them with less important pages. This will help those more important pages visibility on SE’s.
Also helps prevent comment spam. Read Google’s Official comment on ‘No Follow’ tags – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
Matt Cutts opinion – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/quick-comment-on-nofollow/

By: Property Seller

Property Seller — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:52:23 +0000

I found with a lot of blogs that the intial obstacle to overcome is to learn how to get in backend and sort out the code so that the site is decently optimised onsite. I’m only just getting to grips with this for blogger at the moment.
Good onsite optimisation is a must and even a lot of big property websites fall a long way short on this. Onsite optimisation is the ground work that needs doing in order to build the foundations of a good search marketing campaign and your link building will go a lot further if you get this right. For instance, on my first property website (just a small affair selling one house) it only took me about a week to kick the asses of a lot of property sites that have been around for years for my chosen key phrases. Still less than 250 inbound links to the site and onsite op is doing about 50% of the work.

By: Tina Kelly

Tina Kelly — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:23:05 +0000

I have to agree with you about the white-hat SEO and don’t think you have to use any black hat tricks to obtain proper search engine optimization.
Like you said, just write and don’t worry about any of it. I know it works for me.
Truly,
Tina Kelly

By: Jay Caldwell

Jay Caldwell — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 03:00:02 +0000

Great advice Matt! I too was sucked in by the abundance of page rank information. It wasn’t until recently that I became aware of the importance of website quality. I have left my reciprocal links on there for now, but the quality is slowing improving when I can find the time.

By: Chris Hotz

Chris Hotz — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:53:29 +0000

Great advice Matt. Temporal analysis is a great method used by Google to help determine whether a webmaster is “creat[ing] reciprocal links for the act of creating them”.
Like I said –
“Reciprocal linking (like candy) is not a terrible thing. But do not create reciprocal links for the act of creating them.”
In short, just keep it real and Google will not penalize you.

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 04:29:54 +0000

Good post and discussion here. My wife’s a real estate agent, and I know there’s a lot of interest in SEO these days amongst agents and agencies, which I think is great. She pointed me to this post, actually.
I hope it’s not too bold of me to say a couple things from the perspective of someone who’s been doing SEO for about 7 years now.
Reciprocal linking in and of itself isn’t evil (as Chris said) and won’t get you banned, penalized, whatever. The problem occurs when you do too much of it.
There’s a bigger issue to think about: TRUST. Google, in particular, is built very heavily these days on the idea of TrustRank. TrustRank is done at the domain level, unlike PageRank which is done at the page level. Your goal is to build up as much trust in your domain as possible. Apologies for the link drop, but I wrote about the importance of trust in my first post of the year:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2007/01/01/the-1-seo-and-marketing-tactic-for-2007/
Google has a profile of your domain. They know how often you add new content, they know how often you get new links, etc. You may have read SEOs talk about “temporal analysis” — that’s what they mean, analysis of data over time. If you tend to get about 5 new links per month and then all of a sudden you get 100 the next month, that’s a red flag. It’s not natural. It’s not necessarily bad — you may have been on digg or featured on CNN or whatever, so no penalty for that. But if you suddenly have a 1,000% increase in links and they’re all reciprocal … well, those links will likely be discounted.
Google also knows how many links you have, how many of those links are unique and how many are traded, etc. So reciprocal linking is only a bad thing when traded links make up the vast majority of your profile. Natural link development involves SOME traded links, but it also involves plenty of one-way links. And if those one-way links are from trusted domains, you’re on your way.
It’s really important to keep this profile idea in mind as you develop your sites, your blogs, your links, etc. If I may also link to one other post:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2007/01/22/ultimate-guide-to-building-the-perfect-link/
That should answer almost any question about link building, but if not I’d invite folks to contact me directly and I’ll be glad to help.
Sorry for taking up so much space. And sorry for the links… I tried to “nofollow” them but got an error message for using HTML. Whoops!

By: Chris Hotz

Chris Hotz — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:44:22 +0000

Directories are a good thing. If adding yourself to a public directory be sure the directory is well respected by search engines. You can their page rank for an idea of their quality.
Great comment Andy. Building your own directory can help. If you click on the link in the article under “Directories are useful, right?” their is a great articel about Elite Directories.
Visit http://www.tomatoblogs.com/ to view the Tomato’s elite directory built with hard work and much love.