Has your site's positions suddenly dissappeared from Google or have your positions greatly improved from what they were prior to this most recent update?

Let's talk about it and see if we can figure out if there has been any major changes in Google's ranking algorithm that affects real estate sites

I don't see any real change in the sites that I follow - so at this point I personally don't see any drastic change. How about you?

Have noticed one consistant issue with ePRO realtors who are members of the IREGagents.com reciprocal link program.

I have six customers who are part of this program, which has definitely helped in Google rankings. After this last update, every single one dropped dramatically. I wrote the President of the company, who felt it was not this program that was causing the drop. Unfortunately, I'm batting 100% on this one. Every single one dropped dramatically. Other sites which are NOT members of this reciprocal link program have stayed the same or are ranking even higher. It could be the change in the valuation of inbound links, it could be considering this page duplicate content... I don't really know.

I have put up a poll on the subject, just to feel this out before I recommend my customers remove this from their websites. If you are participating in this program, please let me know how your ranking has changed. The poll is at http://www.fredlight.com/ireagents.html and am looking at a few template sites and custom site ranking changes.... Thanks.

I believe that their reciprocal linking program involves uploading the exact same batch of links to every site - is that correct?

Google (and Yahoo) has penalized template sites in the past for this but I think that those penalties were likely manually applied after complaints from the public. Perhaps now they have a "filter" to really catch such link schemes?

They have been saying for quite a while that link schemes were a target. This scheme is a little different than what we normally think of as trading reciprocal links so those reading this shouldn't panic and think that their reciprocal links pages will cause them grief.

Having said that... There was quite a bit of buzz a month or so ago about sites with link directories (with multiple categories) being hit. It may be because many of the categories were not related to the theme of the site though - my guess would be that just having real estate categories would not be a problem.

It is the same batch of links to I believe 300 realtors, all ePROs. They are all on one page (some say having more than 50 or 100 links per page is a problem) and it's duplicated on everybody's site (so, in effect it would be a duplicate content issue, although only one single page).

It has had a positive effect up until this update, I must admit. But they're all wiped out now!

From what I've learned, Google is giving the most clout to one-way links due to these link farm schemes. I've seen a dramatic increase in our rankings in a relatively short timeframe for our main website, http://www.VegasNewHomeFinders.com

Our domain is only 10 months old, and we are ranking as high as #20 for Las Vegas Real Estate, a term with almost 14 million results(granted we are doing the Google dance right now and are shuffled daily up and down! . I have been focused on one-way links for the last couple of months, and have launched upwards.

Any thoughts?

One way links have always been good. You do have 9 pages of reciprocal links though and they do not seem to be hurting you either

Hi Doug,
I have learned alot from your posts about Google and improving page rank. I would like to also emphasize the importance of other search engines which can bring a considerable amount of traffic. I am thinking of Yahoo and MSN. With both many people that I have talked with have found SEO easier and less competitive.

-Peter

According to Danny Sullivan over at Searchenginewatch.com....

Overall, Jagger seemed to downplay the value given to certain types of reciprocal links, and it also seemed to reward sites that have stood out as authorities in their area. Some duplicate content penalties and mistakes have also been reported, and domain name/canonical issues seem to be continuing....

That is about the way I see the update as well - nothing really new except some link schemes have been devalued.

Not sure if you've heard but there's word of another Google PageRank update

I had read about that somewhere too. This is certainly a marathon update session. It began long before they officially named it Jagger and still continues. Matt Cutts had said a couple of weeks ago that those using subdomain spam would soon be hit as well. Since that doesn't appear to have happened yet we may be in for still more changes before the year is out.

We had a site called Americascondos.com for several years, we published another site Americascondos.net which was similiar but was used for FSBO condos which is a different concept than americascondos.com. When we first published the .net site (before the jagger update) we had LOADS of traffic immediately. After the update, the traffic dropped considerably. I think it was because both sites were considered "mirrored", even though the sites pointed toward another audience.

Both of your condo sites have exactly the same Title and Description meta tag - which google would definately see as duplication. Try changing those tags in one of the sites - you may see improvement as a result.

Thanks for the advice...we'll do that.

Thanks for the info...I'm learning by the minute.

I just posted some Jagger info in the Most link exchanges are of no benefit - how to tell if it is worth it. I took a drop right after the last phase of the update but bounced up quickly due to the fact that I have been working on building one way inbound links from contextual sites. It also helped that I target many low competition keywords.