Somebody posted a link to a discussion on another forum in a thread here a few days ago...

Apparently many Advanced Access sites and realestatewebmasters.com template sites have removed their links pages as a result of penalties/rank reductions by Google. My understanding is that these penalties were likely manually applied and may be across the board to all of their customers.

When I search Google, sites from both of these providers seem to have disappeared from their previous positions so there is the appearance of penalties. I do not know how these providers arrived at the conclusion that the culprit was their links pages, but Google is on a bit of a mission to curb the use of inappropriate (in their view) reciprocal links and I guess Google figured that this is a good way to throw a scare into the real estate industry.

If your site has a large link directory with categories for Realtors by states, mortgages, travel, vacation rentals, and lots of other stuff - that seems to be what Google deems inappropriate for an individual Realtor's site. I doubt that having such a directory automatically will result in a penalty - this current issue does seem to be a "hand" job. You may want to rethink any aggressive link exchange campaigns though.

Since none of my sites have such a directory, and since the penalties are manually applied I for one am not rushing to make any changes.

If you have traded links with any sites from Advanced Access or RealEstateWebmasters you should be aware that they are probably no longer linking back to you - those that still do will probably be removing their links pages in the near future so check on that every once in a while.

Are there any AA or REW customers here that have any insider info on this?

[It seems debate at REW is being stifled ] *Edited to remove link as the target blog post has since been edited to remove the content and all comments

Advanced Access's recommendation to their customers to remove links from their sites
Realestatewebmasters advising customers to drop their State pages

I'm glad template sites were being punished by link farms. I'm probably on a soap box, but I'd prefer we stop trying to "trick" google for a top ranking and just have good sites with valuable content. I'm wondering when Google is going to figure out how people are exploiting blogs to get false rankings. I'm starting to get annoyed when I pull up a blog on a topic that I like and all the writer did was type the keywords repeatedly on the page.

It's interesting that so many people are jumping to conclusion that it is the individual state pages that are getting these sites penalized. IMHO, dropping all of your state pages is jumping the gun. If you do a Google real estate search on any market, you will still find plenty of top 10 sites that utilize individual state recip link pages.

More than likely, any penalties imposed were because these sites formed their own link networks. If you have an AA site, you should be worried. If you thought you were striking gold when you exchanged XXX links with REW (or someone else) you should delete their links from your recip links pages and get out of their link network.

As Doug pointed out, so far penalties appear to be limited. But if you read some of the threads he linked to, there is no empirical eveidence that state pages are the culprit.

As always, be very careful who you choose to exchange links with. And NEVER fall into the trap of getting 50+ links from one source. Eventually, it may hurt your own rankings.

Realestatewebmasters.com was very aggressive soliciting link exchanges and had a full time staff working on it. I know I received emails everyday from them. They offered to supply a block of links with their agent sites and also included a link in their directory if you placed a link on the main entry page of your site.

It seems that every where I look agents now have a link to realestatewebmasters.com on the front page of their website - but guess what? It seems that they have cleaned out their directory and now there are very few listings in it.

So if you placed a link to realestatewebmasters.com on your site you should check that you are still listed in their directory as they have removed almost everyone including their own website clients.