The recent Google PR update has brought changes to many sites, some good, some bad. I have seen several analyses and most are claiming link relevance. I would be interested in hearing from the many SEOs and webmasters on here who are deeply involved in link exchanges. If you went up or down in PR what do you attribute it to? Blindly entering in link exchanges may be a waste of time or it may not, but without examining the results we will never know.

Interesting
I can tell you all from experience that if your sole purpose is to get Goggle’s ranking you are barking up the wrong tree. I do almost 80% of my business off my web sites. I get a lot of hits from Google but most of my business comes from link exchanges. However first let me say those link farms do no good at all. You have to do linking with a plan. The links that are either real estate related and or extremely local in nature are very good for search engines like Google. However xxx, Viagra, and or those gambling types do no good and in fact hurt your ranking. I have found that those companies that require a link off of the front home page are actually useless in terms of generating you business. Links on sites that are extremely local in nature are very good. It’s like a park bench. For example someone is looking at a restaurant that is in your area and sees your name again and again etc. I have actually gotten business from a link off a local web site. So in my humble opinion is that links are extremely good and even better then Google. However you have to have a plan and know where to place those links. The link page does not have to be indexed by Google but someone from the general public has to be able to get to it.

I keep reading articles about being in the Google "sandbox" for new sites, in that Google does not recognize new sites for up to a year. Is this true? I have page one ranking in MSN, but no ranking in Google or Yahoo. My website is www.maureenmegowan.com

Google will list a new site quickly but that site will not appear in searches for competitive keywords for a very long time. Personally, I think a year is on the optimistic side for most real estate sites if the domain is new.

Hello,
think that Google and other search engines prefer old sites and it takes some time to get a new site established.
Started a new site a few months back and Google had the first pages cached after 20 days. But site still gets very few traffic from Google.
Reactivated an old site that is 9+ years online but had been reduced to an intro page and member only pages for 3 years and Google cached hundreds of sites within days. Pageviews went up from approx. 400,000 to well above 800,000 within a month and most visitors come from Google search results.
As I see it it, 4 things are important:
- links on industry related sites
- fresh content ( site got approx. 1,000 new listings in a month = 1,000 new pages of content)
- pages without appended IDs, listing numbers etc are preferred
- an always up to date Google sitemap

The only difference between the old and new site is the age and the link popularity ( something like 30,000 old site).

hape

One thing that goes around is the Google "sandbox"
I've heard of many people who submit their sites, get a decent spot in the rankings, then after a little bit they are suddenly gone from the rankings and everyone wonders what in the world happened. Supposedly you get sent to the sandbox and for about a year you don't get good rankings, and then all of the sudden it shoots up. I've only ever heard speculation though, maybe someone else can add to this.
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BNizzle - fo shizzle
Check out some Bloomington, IL Real Estate

I'm fairly new to the recip link thing and realize from what I have read that I am linking to some useless sites. Thanks for the great information.

hi Doug
Reciprocal Link exchange is an efficient way to set up links from related websites. In reciprocal link exchange development, you trade links with related impending partner sites by present a link back to their site from your site.

Reciprocal link exchange can be successfully used as a means of promote your website, product, or service. It can be a very efficient and cheap way to help your website traffic grow and succeed online. Reciprocal link exchange can also add to your website's link reputation, and lead to a improve in your website's search engine ranking. The higher your website travel, the higher your proceeds. Search Engine Genie does reciprocal link replace and manages your link construction operation effectively.

http://propertyauctionzone.com

A lot of webmasters make the mistake of being too anxious to get into Google. The best thing is to be passive aggressive. Some sites get ranked in 6-8 months, but only if some really great related sites are linking to them

A few things on the recent Google Jagger Update.

1- non-recip links are the only ones that will give a significant keyword boost
2- link must be from a themed site or maybe just a themed page, but it would be best if the whole sites theme fit yours.
3- recip links have been devalued even further. While I have noticed some of my relevant recip links showing back up with google, the majority have not.
4- the link should(to have any value) be from within the content of the site NOT a links section (that is going to be VERY hard)
5- internal linking must look natural and not over optimized
6- links must be built slowly - I am working with 10-15 a week. I would not recommend over 50 a month however.
7- 3 ways links can be tracked
8- Even more of a focus on natural linking. Click Here or site URL have finally gained some value.

A tip for those just starting out with their web presence.

Do not submit your site to any major search engines. Let them index you naturally. There are a few "search engine legal" ways to do this naturally that you can find tutorials on with a quick ask jeeves search, most of them involving RSS.

Most of all remember, Google is a tactic not a strategy. Yahoo and MSN will provide traffic and they still value more types of linking than google.

Hope this sheds a little light for some of you.

I would say that well of 90% of the links/resources pages on web sites - especially real estate web sites - are junk and provide zero credibility as a link to your site.

Here are some things that we look out for in link building aside from the indexing items and proper use of HTML for the links as discussed earlier:

1. Examine the robots.txt file for page exclusions.

2. Examine html code of the link page and all pages leading from the home page to the link page to make sure there are no rel=nofollow tags that prohibit spiders from finding the links page or outbound links.

(Note: some dishonest webmasters will allow the page to be cached, show page rank, then exclude the pages from robots).

3. Link pages are never more than three pages deep from the home page.

4. The pages that our links are to appear on must be classified properly (i.e. for real estate they are dedicated to the same state as our client site).

Link strategies are going to change in the near future. Adding value to links in a search engine algorithm is a great move, but too many people figured out how to link bomb their way to good rankings. The search engines know that they have to stop this practice.

The best and most logical way to do this is decrease the value of reciprocal links and to place a greater value on the relationship of the outbound link page with the receiving link page (i.e. specific content).

I believe that within the next few algo changes at Google there are a ton of sites that are going to get hit hard because of poor link practices - even if they worked in the past. Once Google takes this step, Yahoo and MSN are sure to follow sometime down the road.

Content based link exchanges are going to be the next hot trend in link building. We're so convinced of that fact that we have just released a web site dedicated to content based links for real estate. I don't want to be seen as spamming this board, so you can PM me or email me for the link.

The basis of this site is not quantity of links, but quality of links. There is a multi-step qualification process for prospective members, and I anticipate that well over 50% of the sites will be rejected from membership. Membership is free, but it may become an annual fee service in 12 months or so if the time it takes us to support this site takes away from taking on our fair share of new clients.

As far as the Sandbox is concerned, my belief is that the Sandbox is weighted heavily upon the age of the links. We have taken over SEO for domains that were 3-4 years old (and had content on the sites for that period) and had very few links. Factor in the time that it took to build links and have the search engines find those links and there was still a Sandbox period - although it appears to be smaller than for new sites. I only have data on a handful of sites, so it's not definitive proof - just an observation.

Webmasters who make PR the deciding factor, scare me.

any amout of link growth is alright as long as you have a steady increase. If you add 200 per month and stay at that # you will be fine.
If you do 200 for 2 months and then add 600 the next you look like a spam site to google. the changes in the algorithm is to slow down the spam sites. And link popularity can be defined. Why do people complicate this? If you want #1 in google for the term "goat hair" then you need to analyize that site. check their onpage work and try to match or one-up them there. Then you need to check backlinks. check the % of their anchor text and relevence of the sites linking to them and get a step ahead. Link popularity is directly related to the targeted keywords or phrases that you are targeting. This is NOT rocket science, Yet it is an exact science! adding to it frustrates for no reason. I have taken several hundred sites to the top of the majors over the last 4 yrs. stick with the basics and you will never be let down!

one other thing. As far as the comments about link exchange being a thing of the past. This is a HUGE LIE! the entire internet is based on a network of links. to try to end this would slow the internet to a crawl. This is just manipulating the public to buy into a scam! Think about it? use some common sense. If you have to use one way links, then WHERE are you going to get them from in the future? Blogs? you will run out of them also. how will they reach the top of serps if everyone just wants a link from them and will not point a link to them.

You can only search 1000 results deep! after the first 50 you will not have any PR on the blogs which gives you a low quality link.

Are you going to build and host 400 blogs with origional content so you can get enough one ways to get top serps. See the Holes in this approach? Link exchange is not dead and will never die unless the entire network we call the internet dies! Do not fall for these scams. I have paid many dollars for traffic when I first started on the internet in the 90's. That is why i learned SEO, the only traffic I got from these scams and lies was the traffic of my money going down the road. SEO does change a little. But the basics will ALWAYS be the same!!!!!!

As long as sites do things "black hat" that are underhanded trying to trick Google, then linking can be detrimental to your rankings and hurt what you are trying to do.

I agree with the vast majority of the posts here, but the vast majority of the posts are about Google.

I get a ton of traffic from Yahoo and MSN even though they make up less than half of the search traffic. But SEARCH traffic is not all traffic. Yahoo has an excellent local search directory. (Get into Yahoo Local and ASK your clients to rate you there. You will be put to the top of the listings if you have the most ratings)

Anyway, having sites link to you is a way to increase your rank. Be a bit wary of the sites that force you to give them a link back. That link back, just as Doug mentioned, may be helping them and NOT HELPING you at all.

BTW, I operate a FREE directory where you can list your site (as long as you are a real estate agent or broker) absolutely FREE. The link will never expire and will never cost you anything. You never have to link back to my site either.

The site operates on a php script which is an open source script that queries a database. Google can fully read the links and follow each one of them.

Hope this helps,