Okay I think I will agree with you that REW did not get in trouble for buying links. They did something else. I did find this quote

MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site’s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn’t know why the site’s pages got Google’s thumbs-down.

“So many of the rules are vague,” Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic.

To show that buying links will get you go directly to jail without passing go. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

Directories are a waist of time now from Google point of view; they do count as backlinks but they won't be counted as quality backlinks, seriously.

Here are few ways to get quality backlinks:

1 - Write an article, submit it to article directories with a backlink to your website.

2- create social bookmarking accounts and submit your website to social bookmarking, make sure you have some friends there.

3- find a blog relevant to your niche, ask them if they can let you place a blogpost on their blog, remember, this is paid but counted as one of the best and quality backlinks.

The last one is SEM ( search engine marketing ).

Find a blog relevant to your niche, post a comment with a link back to your website

there you go

A link is a link

http://www.directorycritic.com/

Find Real Estate Directories to submit to. In yahoo if type this commend link:www.somesite.com you can check to see were the competing sites have links. Good Luck.

Thank you for the directory I put it to good use!

here you go

http://home.beamed.com/submit/index.shtml

Mass submission systems are blacklisted from most of the major search engines. The best way to get listed is to enter your site into DMOZ.org, they are a non-profit, volunteer run, directory listing site that sells their data to all the major search engines (google, msn, yahoo, etc.). But be keep in mind, it may take a few months to get listed. You could of course, volunteer to help them and they allow you to post your site (as long as you dont spam) faster.

DMOZ vs lots of free directory what would be better?

We submitted our site to DMOZ months ago and are still not listed. I would say free directories.

DMOZ is the best, but it will take awhile (months sometimes). Once you are in DMOZ you will be listed in google, yahoo, msn, and others. WELL WORTH THE WAIT!

Also make sure you cross all your t's and dot all your i's when you submit to DMOZ, else they will dump your submission.

We're not exactly a "directory" site, but we'll get your name in search engines. I'm looking for beta testers, too, to try it for free: http://www.agentgrade.org

Nick

The problem with social bookmarking is you're not getting a direct link to your site and their's some cases the bookmarking site outranked your site.

I like the idea but the ranking system is a little weak. It looks like you can rank yourself and since it is beta I am sure most people did. All the luck to you I hope it works out.