Another thing that came up in this post was the apparent PR0 penalty given to participants of a link scheme. I just gave the links pages a quick glance but it seems that this was not the normal link farm where all links pages are the same. Not all links on these pages seem to be the same - perhaps an A-B-C links scheme? Those were once thought to be a safer way to go but apparently not.

Does anyone have the time and energy to look closer at those links pages?

I'll try to make some time next week if noone has looked yet.

I just did a little test - I took the subject site's links page and randomly chose 4 of her links partners. All four were also penalized. I then compared all of the links pages and found that all of the links pages were totally different - no duplicate links on any of the pages.

Seems to me that Google is definately recognizing their setup as a link farm (which it is) even though it is not a link farm in the traditional sense.

Also, it appears that these sites were not caught in a filter (unless the filter has not yet been applied to the entire index) as a search of Google shows that there are still some of the provider's sites that are on the link program that have not yet been penalized. It may have been a manually applied penalty. My hunch has always been that all PR0 penalties are manual.

Well, she's got some 'splainin to do.

How would she clear this all up? Should she start with a totally new domain name and optimize the white hat way?

I'd recommend pulling that domain, getting a new one and putting up a true directory where agents could be listed state by state or international. That would be percieved as a potential value to website visitors that might need to relocate to those other areas. Then, do straight reciprocal links to other RE sites that have a similar directory structure - no more than 50 links on a page.

Thoughts?