Real Estate SEO Adviser

Going Overboard With Reciprocal Links

A lot of real estate agents over-rely on reciprocal linking networks as a way to boost their search engine ranking. And they are later surprised when they incur a Google penalty that drops their search engine ranking down several pages. So I would like to dig deeper into the world of reciprocal linking to shed some light on things…

Let’s revisit the goal of search engine companies for a minute. These companies derive massive revenues from their search engine advertising / pay-per-click programs. These programs, and the revenue they produce, depend on a broad user base. Well, in order to retain and expand their user base, search engine companies are always looking for ways to reward truly popular websites and demote unpopular or manipulative websites. Link popularity is one of the ways they reward popular websites with higher ranking.

Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of other websites that link to yours. If I link to your website from the home page of my website, I am contributing to your link popularity and helping your search engine ranking — especially if my own website is relevant to yours and well-recognized by search engines.

Now enter the concept of reciprocal links. Most people reading this article will be familiar with this concept, but for those who aren’t … a reciprocal link is when two or more websites agree to link to one another to mutually boost search engine ranking. On a small scale, this technique has its merits — provided you carefully screen reciprocating websites for quality and relevance. But I can’t tell you how many real estate agents I’ve seen who over-rely on this tactic, to the point that most or all of their links come from reciprocation programs.

In fact, there is a well-known real estate website company who engaged in this sort of tactic, and encouraged many of their customers to participate as well. Long story short, hundreds (possibly thousands) of real estate websites recently suffered from a Google “crackdown” to penalize the participants of this massive reciprocal linking network.

Again, we revisit the business model of a search engine like Google. Search engine companies want to reward truly useful and popular websites … websites that attract and acquire links in a natural way. If a website gets all of its links from a massive reciprocation scheme, it signals that the website is not popular or useful enough to attract links in a natural way. Thus, they will often demote the ranking of such websites. It’s all about integrity of search results, retaining the user base, and maximizing ad revenues.

The best way to acquire links to a website is by having a website worth linking to in the first place. If your website is a truly useful resource, people will link to it naturally (after finding it). Your direct competitors obviously won’t link to you, but others in the real estate and lateral industries likely will.

You can also diversify and strengthen your link popularity by publishing articles online, publishing press releases online, and submitting your website to high-quality web directories. But you should always do these things with people in mind first. If you write an article with the intention of publishing it online, it should be a helpful article that truly deserves a place on the web. This will make people more inclined to visit your website, link to it, recommend it to others, etc.