So is it just me or are the rest of you getting emails from the Google Real Estate Team flogging Adwords?

One interesting excerpt - "Google’s real estate industry experts, sales and client service teams will launch and optimize your campaign to ensure you are reaching your customer acquisition and ROI objectives."

Does anyone still think that Google's efforts over the last couple of years to prevent individual Realtor sites from ranking well naturally for competitive keywords was not for the reason of selling Adwords?

Hmmmm! Food for thought, I have not been swamped by Google spam, but have purchased AdWords and it seems to be working quite well.

I made a decision based on costs and ROI that online advertising would give me a competitive advantage. (but not for long)

It all comes out of my advertising budget, so i am sorry to say that my local paper is missing a fraction of my ad spend

As for google "preventing individual Realtor sites from ranking well" I seem to agree, in my local market the biggest real estate websites that represent all agents get all the good placement, and now due to competition between them they are starting to move to pay per click also, forcing bids higher

Doug,

I noticed from your blog

"I would recommend that you regularly check to ensure those you have traded links with are keeping up their end of the bargain. You may be surprised at what you find. Today for example I was checking the reciprocal links of a client's site and found that 100% of the links we had carefully accepted over the last couple of years had stopped linking back. Every last one!"

It's been a common practice for many years and there is no solution.

Well, I do SEO marketing. If you have a keyword that you would like to see yourself on the first page of google with, let me know. We can work on a trade or something.

For example. Look up in Google "openmls" "mls chapala" "mls ajijic" I'm on the first page of google for all of those keywords. Pretty soon, I'll be up there with "MLS MEXICO". That's the one I'm working on this week.

google make money out of ads... not SEO... we are the little ones working long hours for a short time result... or you need to have 8,000 back links... to show up nicely.... not that easy... good option... mix PPC with SEO.....