Warning - this is long!

I have run into an interesting situation...

I am my own webmaster, so I did my own link exchanges and spent a lot of time seeking and adding "relocation" partners.

This weekend I went through all my links to make sure my site was still on their site. If I couldn't find my link, I sent the following email about the "missing link" along with linking information:

~~~
Sometime ago we did a link exchange. It now appears that my link has been removed from your site. If you would like for your link to remain on my site, please add my link back to your site and notify me as to its placement.I realize I may have just missed the link – if that is the case, please send me the link and accept my apology for the inconvenience.
~~~

Today, I got a response from one site saying "All taken care of." No link to where it is placed, so I searched and searched. I finally found a teeny, tiny, almost white-on-white link to the referral partner page at the bottom of the main page. A couple clicks later, I found my link. Interesting thing is, the link was there all along and I just couldn't find it. (I actually found some other almost invisible links, too.)

Now to my questions...

Is it true that "almost invisible" links are a no-no?

Does this type of link help me or hurt me as far as SEO and page rank goes?

I have had a couple of requests for links that I have turned down because I couldn't find the link page. They (webmasters) have told me it doesn't matter if people can find the links anyway, because their only purpose is for the search engines. Is this true?

Do you think I should keep this link or get rid of it along with all the others that no longer link back to me?

Any insight will be appreciated!

Betty

Hi Betty,

You should start using a link checking program to ensure your links are kept on their websites. Most website owners will place your link and will remove it a few days later as you don't have time to re-check all of your links all the time.

There is software that will automatically check these links for you.

You should also join the http://www.AgentsExchangeLinks.com it's a fresh new site that we've started last week but it has been started for exactly this reason. All members who join our free service must not cheat and if they are even cought cheating they will be removed from our network and will be placed into our list of cheaters.

Hi Betty.

Yes, hiding links is a no-no. Actually, hiding anything is a no-no. Some websites hide all kinds of things, including entire pages of content that they only show to search engines but not people (cloaking).

It will not hurt you if this website links to you. Search engine designers are smart enough to know that we cannot control who links to us, so there is no harm / no foul there.

However, you do need to be selective in the sites you link to. You can certainly harm your website's reputation by linking to sites that are banned from Google, sites that hide links, etc.

If the website in question engages in that kind of trickery, I would not link to them. It's not worth it, in my humble opinion.

Hope that helps.

-Brandon

Agent and Brandon -

Thanks for your replies! Have a couple more questions/comments, though:

I actually have ARELIS and have used it, but...
When I check sites they indicate are not linked back to me, most of them actually are. Last weekend, I used the "checker" and rechecked each site they said was not linked. Then out of curiosity, I decided to go through some links on my site to see if they were actually still active. (I don't have hundreds of links, so it wasn't a huge undertaking - but not something I want to do very often.) Anyway, I found some sites actually no longer exist and others that appear to have removed my link.

Now, I know some of the disparity between what I found and what ARELIS found could be my "operator" error. So, can you recommend an easier or more accurate program?

When I first got my website, I basically linked with any real estate website I could get to reciprocate. My basic requirements were that it could not be a local competitor or a FSBO site, it had to appeal to me as a "surfer", and they had to have link exchange information on the site.

As time passed and my time became more limited, I stopped actively looking for link partners. I do get link exchange requests and I still use the above criteria; but I added a couple of other criteria, too. They must have an easily accessible partner page and they must link to me prior to my adding them to my site. I do not require they have a certain page rank or a certain type of site - I found that particularly offensive when I started out! It seems some webmasters forget they started out at "0"!

Now, to my question -
How do I determine whether a site has been "banned" by Google or one of the other major search engines?

Again, thanks to both of you for your responses.

Have a great day,

Betty

You should try www.linkmetro.com to generate links to your site. This service offers many automated features that will really help you. You can accept or reject links offered to you based on a site review or page rank etc. and only relevant links can be accepted and reciprocated in an automated fashion. Last time I checked it was a free service.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the suggestion, Richard.

Have a good day,

Betty

Link Checkers

Some of you guys are too trusting when it comes to links. Here is some info that you have to know:

There are ways a programmer can make you think your link is there even though search engines DO NOT see them. This means when you go and visit your link partners website it seems as if the link is there and that everything is fine. But when Google, MSN or Yahoo come by with their bots the programmer can easily hide those links.

So now that you know that, there are also a tone of other ways someone could hide their links from you even though they seem like they are there.

What you need is a good link checking application that has been programmed by someone who understands how these link cheaters work

And I'm happy to say that you can find that link checker here: http://www.realbacklinks.com/link-checker/

Best of all, it's free.

STAY FAR AWAY from ANY automated link swapping services...

"STAY FAR AWAY from ANY automated link swapping services..."

I agree.

I agree, stay away from any auto link programs. Get in the habit of checking your reciprocals fairly often. One of the services ran into some problems last year and many of their clients deleted all their links. That leaves you giving a one-way link to their site. Might not be something you want to do. You also need to check who they are linking with. Their site may be a bad neighborhood, and may do you harm if you are linking to them. There are enough things in linking to keep you up at night.

Thanks for all the advice!

I was warned early on about not using linking services or automated services. I'm not sure I know what a "bad neighborhood" is - I just hope I haven't "bought" into one!

Thanks everyone!

Betty

one that the search engines don't like, if you link to sites that are spammy, and keep doing it, you eventually will become a bad neighborhood as well.

One thing you can use is to look at some of the sites links. Are they the type links you would want representing you to your clients or their kids. If as a realtor, you link with other realtors or real estate directories, you should be in good shape. Remember when linking, you are providing a service to your clients. Keep it related to your business. You need quality links not quantity.

That is my approach! So I should be okay.

I don't link to sites that lack content and I won't link to sites with a conglomeration of unrelated links. Some of my other requirements - easy to find, organized link pages. Also, no FSBO sites, no geographic competitors, etc.

Again, thanks everyone for your help!

Betty

If your link checker is looking at specific urls, and not spidering the whole site, then you will likely get a lot of false negatives.

That is becasue with a lot of link management systems, the links move to other pages.

link checker that look at specific urls are more trouble than they are worth, for that reason.

Use something like LinkSurvey.com

Also, in my experience, people are not placing links then removing them in large numbers. Some people do. Get over it. Forget about it.

Ths work is about gettting more links, not playing link cop over the ones you have. It's a waste of time. Time is precious. Get more links. Look forward, not back.

Unless youwant to spend all your time fretting over links removed. There is virtually NO return on investment in that, since sites that have removed your link will not put it back anyhow. You are wasting time. Precious time.

I do link work for hundreds of sites. This work is all about getting more links. If you are spending any time on link management, it should be focused entirely on that.

Fretting about links removed is almst always complete waste of time.

If you enter a website's address into Google, and it does not come up when searched, that website is either (A) not yet indexed by Google or (B) banned from Google. You could also use a tool like this:
http://www.selfseo.com/google_ban_tool.php

Take care.

If you have a google toolbar the page rank bar will show the site rank in a gray bar, your site stats will drop like a dead horse and sometimes your H page will still display though not often and indexing won't do any good at all. You will become a ghost. The easiest way to avoid being banned is to work within their rules. Do not try to outsmart them. Google gives excellent advice on how to flourish within their system at their site.

Yikes - another way to read that would be Agent Sex Change Links.com - That's what I saw when I took a look at the URL with no capitalization.

Eric Rogers - Century 21 Pro-Team
Aurora Real Estate , Geneva Real Estate , Batavia Real Estate
Real Estate Link Exchange

Also, I think something is broken - I registered yesterday and got my activation over E-mail but when I try to login it still indicates that my account is not activated.

yeah me the same, i tried to join a week ago and still havent got the email back yet

I joined, we'll see what happens!

To the person that asked about checking if a site is banned or not, you can check google using one of these two command operators:

site:domain.com
(replace domain.com with the domain you want to check) and it'll show you pages from that site that google has in their index.

link:domain.com
(replace domain.com with the domain you want to check) and google will show you a sample of links it knows about to that site.

Google will not show all backlinks to a site, and with good reason. If you have a competitor that wants to beat you in your SERP, they'd simply get links from the same sites that link to you. Google doesn't want to make it easy for people to cheat like that.

If your site is ranking well in the SERPs, you've more than likely done something right in order to get there and the less help the blackhats get, the better off you are.

If you haven't checked into Google sitemaps yet, you should because it'll tell you pages on your site google has had errors with, or 404s if the pages aren't there, and even if there's a lag time for page request because of a slow server.

I came across this forum because I was indexing some real estate sites in my directory. I'm not a real estate agent -- I'm a programmer and web designer and know this stuff really well.

This seems like a nice forum, so I joined, and maybe I might be able to help someone out.

Anyway, nice to meet all of you, anyhow.

Deb-

I'm the one who posted that inquiry - thank you so much! And welcome to the group!

Betty

Thanks, Betty.

I had a look at your site -- not too bad. Did you do it yourself?

You're missing your doctype tag and the charset tag, though. Those are both needed, and the body tag should all be on one line.

There's something I'm curious about ...
Since I'm in the den of Real Estate Agents, what better place to ask this question than that?

Agents have websites displaying houses they're selling on the market. They're using the Internet as the medium to generate interest and sort of pre-screen potential clients.

How many (if any) of the homes any of you sell are to persons with disabilities?

By this, I mean -- people who're wheelchair bound, or perhaps blind/low vision?

There's a reason that I ask this. It's a two-parter. After (if) any of you respond to the question, I'll move on to the second part.

I have a lot of friends in real estate and they're all doing their sites just like many here have.

Thanks Deb-

I have done a lot of the content myself, but the basic website is through homes.com. I had the main page concept in mind and they created it.

Now this totally lost me! I know just enough "geek speak" to make me dangerous!

You ought to repost this part in the Agents/Brokers thread. I think you will get a lot more response over there. (I have had clients with limited mobility, but not wheel chair bound.)

Now I'm off to shovel myself out of the house and then I'll be back to check out your sites!

Thanks again,
Betty

Hi Betty,

LOL. Yeah, the snow is hitting us hard today also.

OK, the doctype is the first tag in the very top of a webpage and tells the browser how to display the page.

The charset tag tells the browser what character encoding set to use.

You're using basic HTML so I'd suggest using HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype and since your page is in English and we use Latin characters here you'd use the

charset=ISO-8859-1

charset tag.

You can find the proper doctype example here:
W3C Schools doctype

The site in my sig (the directory) uses the same charset I suggested for you. You can just view source on my page, and copy the tag to get the correct format. However, mine closes like this:
/>
Because I use XHTML. You'd simply remove the forward slash and space and end the tag as follows: >
because you're using standard HTML.

RE: The sites in my sig -- the directory site belongs to me. The forum site is one where I'm a moderator at and it's an SEO forum.

A lot of the stuff I've been talking about with regard to doctype, charset, and so forth, is covered in-depth over there. There's also a web review forum where you can ask for a review and folks there will help you with getting your code corrected and validated.

Simple question regarding SEO.

I have a blog. In my blog I often copy and past an article from another site - ie. from local newspaper - as a post for people to read. (I give credit to the original source of course but this is not the problem) My question is, does this hurt my SEO ranking - I've been reading through a lot of the topics and some have mentioned that posting exact info for other sites is bad and google would look down on it etc.

Also, is it better to have blog seperate from your website - and have links to each OR have the blog as an actual page on your site. Is one idea better then the other for SEO ranking etc.

If your site consists of nothing more than content that also lives on other sites, then yes, it would cause harm to your site because it's what's called "duplicate content."

The search engines (and directories) want to index sites that are unique.

Yes, Google does frown on this practice and it's why they have a duplicate content filter. Your site won't be banned or anything, it just won't rank as well because there's nothing there that's original for the bot to digest and understand.

No site is immune to this, not even a web directory. Many times the site owner will submit their site to several directories using the same description at each and every one.

If the directory uses the owner submitted description without changing anything, and all of the other directories the owner submitted to, also use the description without changing anything, then we now have several cases of duplicate content.

Now, then also, if these are duplicate content across all of these directories then the search engines will only give weight to one of those and ignore the rest. So, the site owner is losing out.

That's why when submitting your site to a directory you should always change the description a little for each one you've submitted to. Many directories won't change the description at all, but in my own directory -- we always change it and never use the description submitted by the owner for the reasons I've already stated.

Having your blog on your site is much better than having it separate from your site because it gives the bots that much more content to work with. Google likes big sites and the more content your site has the better it will do in the SEs because you'd have more visibility with having so many pages.

I just down-sized my own site quite a bit because it was becomming too big. We had over 50,000 pages and it was all unique content. My directory has been online for 9 years now.

Have a read around in the SEO forum listed in my sig. There's a wealth of info there and if you have any other questions, you can join the forum and ask away. People there are very helpful and very friendly. The advice you'd be given is always best practices because it's what we all believe in over there.

Matt Cutts from Google (a.k.a., Googleguy) is a member and so is Adam Lasnik. Both of them are very nice people.

I'm member "WebSavvy" over there.

so to prevent from being punished for duplicate content, would it be enough to for example:

split up the article by adding some personal comments or insite at the beginning, middle or end of the article?

Deb - good to have you on this forum. I just joined yours and am looking forward to it.

I also come from a technical background.

londonguy -- Splitting up the article doesn't do any good either because it's still the same words, no matter how they're split.

There's some software out (very unethical) that will duplicate a printed article, shuffle the words and replace them with other words so that it still is the same context, and they're calling this "repurposed articles" ... and lots of not so bright cheaters are doing this. Google is wise to it though, and are taking actions against it.

So rather than accidently be nailed by a filter set up to grab those kinds of people, you're better off to avoid any similar patterns to begin with.

What you can do is add other supporting content around the reprinted article and it'll give you a well enough mix between what's yours and what you've reprinted.

For example, if you're reprinting an article about Refinance Loans, it'd be nice to perhaps add a small paragraph (supporting content) at the left or right of the reprinted article that quotes some official stats on Refinance Loan rates, etc. Then you could add some links to Lenders, etc.

Google and other SEs like it when you link out to other sites that are themed with the topic that your site is about. This helps Google to understand your site a lot more and rank it accordingly.

Don't buy into the myth that linking out is bad, or that PR means a lot. Because neither is true.

My directory has over 2500+ outgoing links to other sites. My site isn't suffering at all.

The PR right now is 5 on the index page, and most of the inside pages have PR 5-3, all the way down even to the lowest categories.

I just did a major restructure and moved all of it, so right now Google is playing catch-up with the 301s because we moved over 22,000 categories and changed the URL format.

Drew, thanks for the welcome and looking forward to seeing you over at IHY.

The owner of IHY (Doug Heil -- a.k.a. ihelpyou) is also from SC, Charleston area.

This forum will be a learning experience for me too, because I know very little about Real Estate.

I have categories in my directory for Real Estate and we have quite a few sites listed, and lots of submissions in Queue. We also do very well in the SEs for different real estate related queries and do get traffic from those searches.

So, understanding more about Real Estate will help me to define our Real Estate categories a bit more.

Deb, I appreciate the information. Great stuff.

So just final clarification:

Duplicate content on my site doesn't help the SE ranking. But it doesn't hurt it either? - meaning it's the equivilant of not having it all the site at all?

I just want to make sure I can continue to post some duplicate content without it having a NEGATIVE effect on the rankings. Then I can supplement it with some original content allowing the SE to look favourably on my blog and ultimately my website.

Oh, np.

Yep, that's exactly what it means. If you add duplicate content and supplement it by adding supporting content, your site will do much better.

If your site consists ONLY of duplicate content, it risks being hit by a duplicate content filter. A duplicate content filter doesn't mean it's not in the index anymore -- it just means it will be at the very bottom of the pile.

Sometimes that pile can be in the low 400s and no one even really searches beyond the first 4-5 pages.

Now that Google is starting to focus on local search, it'll create a better market for sites to do well in their own neighborhoods.

So, getting themed links in/out, and content that's themed toward your topic will be a win-win in the new Google era.

hope this helps.

Who wants a national real estate link engine broken down by state, then city. Search rosters of agents and offices?

I will create it and set it up if there is interest. FREE to all Real Estate Agents. A place to submit links where your sites can be found. Maybe profiles, who knows.

I have some really cool ideas if anyone wants to post theirs.

Brian

As to Google and backlinks....

someone claimed that Google doesn't show all backlinks to thwart competitors.....??

As far as I can tell, NOBODY in the SEO business has ever been able to explain why Google shows only a small percentage of backlinks with the link: filter. That's the first I've ever heard the "competitive thwarting" concept.

I'd have my doubts if that is their true reason. First, you can get backlinks from other engines. LinkSurvey.com provides avery good, comprehensive tool to find backlinks. We use it all the time here.

Second, you CAN get Goolgle to cough up ALL the backlinks that they see to a domain. It's easy. Just put ".yourdomainname.com" int a Google search, and there they are. Use the leading period, and then your domain name, with or without quotes.










Forget about it.

A quickie from a newbie here - I'd rather have one good link than a 1000 inbound so so links.

Link exchange is going the way of the keyword and the dodo.

Often a person will ask to trade links and stick yours on a PR 0 page which is not at all good.

You really need to be on a high PR page of 6 and up otherwise don't bother.

There are great places to place links for tons of incoming traffic if you look around

yes, the link exchange thing is really deflated in the last while, and duplicate content is questionable, case in point;
one of my sites placed first with all the engines within it's industry. One day I noticed an associates site that jumped to first place. Guess what, every page on thier site that responded to the industry queries where direct copies of my pages. They held first spot for a month until they removed them following a polite 'cease or pay' notice.

Back to links, make sure your linkchecker reviews the robots.txt file. Links on disallowed pages are totally pointless. Further, links on pages that surfers can't see, are pointless.

It's almost more important to first figure out what NOT to do and then to figure out what TO do, when it comes to SEO-- because black hat tricks can get you banned from google indefinitely.

I highly recommend Lynda.com's training on SEO. Check it out. They'll explain what is unethical and why-- so that you can avoid a misstep that can cause you to be banned.

finding real estate related link that are on topic is a great way to promote. Check out one of my 51 directories, They sell as a package deal. It has a PR 3 for now but should increase.