My understanding is that the contextual links scheme run by realestatewebmasters.com has been discontinued and all of the links that they placed on their Realtor websites have been removed or are in the process of being removed. They are not really notifying participants of the fact that their links are no longer being reciprocated.

Since their program was frequently pushed in our reciprocal links forum - as recently as December - many regular participants here should probably be purging their own websites of any links they exchanged with Realtors with websites by realestatewebmasters.

Since many who frequent their forum have also been spooked into removing links - I would suggest that you check all of your link partners to make sure they are still reciprocating and not just taking advantage of you.

hmmm.. I guess building quality links the old fashioned way, one at a time by hand is the way to go. I've been saying this over and over for years and although it's alot more work I've yet to have a client site get blasted in an update or have to start over ...

There's no quick and easy way to the top .. at least not if you want to stay there

As you say, building links by hand is very time consuming and therefore really not economically feasible for a provider to do for more than a handful of websites.

The REW story has been a pattern followed by many before them. Funny thing is that they all think they came up with an idea that no one else has tried.

They start with a couple of sites - usually in old existing domains that already rank fairly well, put in their own sites and add some links to them from their home page - bingo the rankings improve to page 1! Then they advertise the heck out of the results everywhere they can - claiming to be search engine geniuses.


So now they have all these Realtors who expect the same sort of results - the only way to do that on a mass scale is to start aggressively linking between the sites and/or aggressively soliciting exchanges.

Almost all template companies have done this which is why almost all template companies have been penalized at some point. Most used hidden link pages unknown to their customers. Even AA started off many years ago by claiming they were search engine geniuses based on the results of their first few sites.

From my own experience I can say that one has to tread very carefully with links of any kind but they are necessary. It is one of the reasons I personally do not take on too many clients - scale creates that need to push the envelope just a little too far. Unless you leave all search positioning up to the Realtors themselves of course.

Link schemes are attractive to the type of people who buy turnkey sites. They're not interested in contributing to an online community or building a reputation. They just want to spend as little money as possible to rank for terms X,Y, and Z.

It's the typical mindset of your average spammer.