Ever since I saw the penalty instituted against real estate websites for reciprocal and other manipulative link practices, I've been on the lookout for a site I could share (whose owner wouldn't mind). Tonight, I'm lucky enough to have just such a gem.
There can be little doubt that JohnSabia.com, a Fort Lauderdale real estate agent's site, was engaging in some very manipulative linking practices in the past. However, John's a reformed gray hat turned white and knows quite a bit more about the world of SEO than he did prior to Google's shot across the bow for reciprocal linking. Unfortunately for him, the penalty lasts quite a while.
John's given me permission to display his site and some search results related to him in an attempt to illustrate what a harsh penalty at Google really looks like. First, we'll look at the results of 4 different searches that attempt to pull up what should be relatively obvious, navigational searches on John's site.
Google Search - johnsabia.com
This first search tells me that John's not banned - in fact, you can see that 396 pages are in Google's index and the PageRank in the toolbar still shows a 5/10.
Google Search - johnsabia
Obviously, this search should be pulling up John's site. Virtually every page in this list links to his site and there's no other destinations a searcher could likely want using this query. John's actual ranking here is #14.
BTW - I just love the 4th result above - the Google Groups thread on the penalty. I only wish I could say that I've never felt John's pain, but actually, back in 2004, our client's site AvatarFinancial.com was sandboxed so heavily it ranked #350 for the search "avatar financial hard money lenders & bridge loans" - the exact title tag. Maybe the memory of that frustration is, in part, responsible for the inspiration of this post. Now back to the subject at hand...
Google Search - fort lauderdale fl real estate johnsabia
Another very obvious query for John's homepage, including exact text from his homepage's title tag. John's ranking #57 for this query. Incidentally, this should be another good hint at a penalty. By appending additional keywords that are highly relevant to John's site, he should be ranking higher, not lower, than the general query for "johnsabia."
Google Search - bay colony fort lauderdale luxury home john sabia
In this search, I'm looking specifically for John's page on Bay Colony, which Google has in its index, but I won't find it at all in Google's results (though a couple pages from John's site do rank #45th and #46th).
So there you have it folks, a truly penalized site in all its glory. If you're wondering if your site is penalized, you won't find a much better example of what a penalty looks like. Please, do feel free to share examples in the comments if you have them. For some reason, I love looking at how Google penalizes and conducting ridiculously obvious searches that fail to produce the requested site/page.
If you're looking for a process to follow to escape, refer back to my post from a few weeks ago on the topic. John's already submitted his re-inclusion request after removing all his reciprocal links and contacting his real estate friends asking them to remove their links as well. He's been in the penalty zone, allegedly, for over 60 days, and I wouldn't be surprised if the penalty took another 5-10 weeks (or more) to lift.
Full disclosure - I have no relationship, personal nor professional to John or his site, nor do I have any client relationships at the current time in similar fields. John emailed me several weeks back, I gave him a bit of advice, then asked him if I could publicly discuss his site and he agreed.
Some people think that 30 or 60 days for an issue (hidden text, excessive reciprocal linking, or whatever else) is too little, and other people think that it's too much. We'll keep looking for ways to alert webmasters that their site may have issues so that they can correct them. In general if a site is not doing well in Google, that's a good time to take a step back and ask how incoming/outgoing links look, etc.
Hi Matt,
That's understandable and I for one would be happy to just get a little red flag on the site. I can understand why you wouldn't want to give out specifics but for those of us that engage in content building and some minor link exchanges, it's hard to know that there is even a penalty. Especially when we have multiple clients and sites. Is there any way to verify a site and submit it to Google in order to at least get a yes or no answer? By e-mail or other means?
I have a situation at the moment where I need to respond to a client because his ranking dropped and I have no idea what to tell him. It would be nice to say that Google has given you a penalty, we've fixed the problem and we should see it clear up in xx number of days.
Thanks for the post Matt. I would have welcomed some sort of notice to let me know I was violating the guidelines. I would have immediately fixed the problem and said thank you with a smile on my face.
I believe you previously mentioned that it is best to concentrate and build 1 great site versus several average sites. I did that and changed my focus from a few sites to only working on one. But, from a business perspective your current system almost requires us to have multiple websites in case we are penalized.
I had not traded links to any serious degree for probably over a year and half but never got around to deleting all of them. I get paid to sell houses not to cruise through SEO blogs and forums for the latest tips, techniques and potential problems. I would have really welcomed an email.
Matt:Thank you very much for posting.
Ok Matt not to come off like a jerk but since you called me a little kitten I figure it's ok to be a little more direct, and say what everyone is thinking and no one will just come out and say.
Why do you keep sidesteping the questions? Why not just come out and say, "yeah they did X, Y, and Z we don't like that and they got banned, filtered or penalized". I mean why be so curiosly ambigous? It's obvious somethings going on and if it's what google wants take credit for taking action.
Sidestepping the issue with editorial like "some people want us to be more/less harsh" doesn't move the conversation forward, it just creates a quagmire of bickering shifting attention away from the real issue.
Why not come out and tell people in webmaster central that they are penaized or filtered. the excuse that "some people will take advantage of it" doesn't hold water. The people who will take advantage already are and probably aren't using webmaster central in the first place. So what you are really doing is keeping good info out of the hands of the people who are most likely to use it and fix the offenses.
"come off like a jerk"
Michael, you don't. And if you do in the eyes of one or the other, ignore it.
I am preaching to the choir here, i know :)
Matt, you shut a bunch of the penalized Realtors up with your "30 to 60 day" penalty comment. A few sites came out of the penalty box but there still several of us still in trouble. Does the punishment really equal the crime?
Hi,MakeMost off this people real estate agent.They are not SEO professional.Try to develop better SEO algorithm.Google just choose lazy way to fix a problem.
What is the recovery time frame for Penguin update, If we assume all the issues are fixed.. Thx
It would be great if Google implemented a place in Webmaster tools to tell you if you've been filtered, penalized or banned and what steps you should take as well as typical timelines for such filters, penalties or bans.
Once a site was verified the owner could see this data and at least they would have to guess or rely on the word of someone who might not know. This is a feature they could really use IMO (not because I get penalized, but because I know others who have by not fault of their own).
Nice post Rand, hopefully for your friend the penalty doesn't last long or you guys can figure a way to break out. I noticed a lot of Real Estate webmasters and marketing professionals squirm in their chairs when Matt talked about this at SMX.
I agree eCopt. There has to be a better system. The emails that Google supposedly sent out notifying webmaster of a potential problem was a great idea. However, I never received one of those. I know they are no longer doing that because of spoof emails.
This is like being in jail with no idea of the length of your sentence.
Outside of RE it could mean being laid off without knowing when you will be called back to your "pick and pack" job.
Yeah, the emailing was good, but very in-efficient IMO. It takes a lot more work to correspond via email back and forth than it would to automate the process with the Webmaster tools control panel. There could be penalty tickets open and they could rate them in priority for the technicians who are available to look into them. It wouldn't have to be 100% automated, there could still be a little human interaction on difficult to determine filters, penalties and all out bans.
Google definitely needs to let people know if they have been penalized. Like you mentioned, Google could use the Webmaster Tools to let people know. Otherwise sites that are doing nothing malicious who are getting accidentally penalized have no way to know that something is wrong...
I'm not very impressed with Google and the search engines in general. I see sites all the time that outrank us with links from non-relevant asian sites that are not in english. Clearly bought. What dog grooming has to do with Liposuction I will never understand. So what if a bunch of real estate people link to each other. It's not a bad thing. If they don't think it's relevant, don't give the links weight.
Penalizing a site for linking between other industry sites is ridiculous. The fact that they don't even inform the site is negligent. These are businesses and people trying to make money for their families like anyone else. If one day Google decides that it wants to play by a new set of rules, they should tell the sites instead of harming their business and then ranking them again after the spanking.
Was the banned site not worthy or ranking or did they not like the linking? If it was not a good site, it should never rank again. If it was good, why are they being penalized? It's like some ridiculous game with no regard for peoples' lives.
Nice post NickNick. I agree with you. There has to be a better system. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Realtors were doing reciprocal linking. Yes, I agree it is a link scheme designed to increase rankings and goes against Google webmaster guidelines. An email from Google warning me about the problem would have corrected it very quickly. Instead, I have to sit in this penalty box hoping for Google to let me out.
My website was probably 75-80% of my business. I have a family to feed. I don't appreciate Google using a small group of us to spread the word about reciprocal linking. One post on Matt's blog about excessive reciprocal linking in the real estate industry would have spread through the industry like wild fire.
As much as I don't want to I am going to have to build another good website. The re-inclusion process takes too long and I don't want to run the risk of getting penalized for something else that may look a little grey.
Good point nicknick.
If it would be "all for the user" and "relevance", penalties and bans should not exist. Content is either relevant or it is not. If it is relevant, show it, if it is not, don't. If somebody looks clearly for a specific site, show it.
But that would be less fun and more work for Google, wouldn't it?
The resulting backlinks derived from this article could help his site too ;)
Good call, Shor...Starting with a quality link from a strong domain like SEOmoz.
Good example. Was cool of John to share the insight.
Not that I'm encouraging artificial link generation, but it looks like some of John's other content distribution (his blog and Squidoo page) were still in the results. It'd be interesting to note how those peripheral things are affected (if at all) if they are linking into the main site.
Great post. I know from experience with real estate clients that it is a highly competitive business and they will do just about whatever it takes to get an edge in the rankings. When I was doing web design I'd have them come in with all kinds of requests including link spamming.
I think I'll bookmark this post for future reference and to show the next agent who comes in wanting to rank #1 for "fill-in-the-city real estate".
A...err... friend of mine sorted out this same problem, not by informing Google manually of bad behaviour as you do with a reinclusion request, but by a) cloaking standardized texts that could appear anywhere and b) buying some big links.
Rand,
Thanks for doing the legwork and showing what a "penalty" site looks like on Google results.
Hopefully Google will bring back these real estate sites and the others that were penalized (as long as they have cleaned up the bad stuff) into the SERPS.
Rand how do these examples explain that this website was penalized because of reciprocal links? I am failing to see the connection. Surely their is more information than just trying a few queries in Google and not seeing the website appear?
I used to think that Google filters out reciprocal links that are excessive, crappy or un-relevant. Does this example try to say Google penalizes for such actions?
"Some people think that 30 or 60 days for an issue (hidden text, excessive reciprocal linking, or whatever else) is too little, and other people think that it's too much. We'll keep looking for ways to alert webmasters that their site may have issues so that they can correct them. In general if a site is not doing well in Google, that's a good time to take a step back and ask how incoming/outgoing links look, etc."
Wow so Google does penalize a website for "excessive" reciprocal linking. What is excessive?
As you're probably aware, the penalty was handed out to several thousands of websites specifically in the real estate sector and specifically for the kind of reciprocal linking they engaged in.
You could certainly question whether John's website fell into that group - perhaps he didn't get caught by the penalty that affected many of his peers, but was, rather, hit by another penalty, conincidentally at the same time, for an offense which we haven't yet discovered. I give this a low liklihood of being true, but I'm not armed with enough data to rule it out entirely.
OK lets assume that that it was a "reciprocal link penalty".Is it now safe to say Google will penalize those that trade links on medium to large scale? Sure mini-networks built by one person/entity has always been a no-no, but to simple demote a wide spectrum of websites in the same niche for simple trading relevant links seems little nutty to me.An I crazy here? Wouldn't it be better to simple not count those links? I mean the website in this example is not even show up for the their own name. Seems harsh for simple trying to build business.I must note I don't actively practice reciprocal linking but many do online. This could really scare them to see such a penalty being implemented internally at Google.
That's always been my thought as well. I think it's fair that a site engaging in manipulative practices of any kind shouldn't rank well because of the manipulation, but I question the use of penalties over filters.
Penalties should be in place when you can determine that the intent was to manipulate, but many manipulative practices come about more because of a lack of understanding than bad intent.
We here know better because we live in the world of search. The average mom and pop doesn't. They hear somewhere that you should get more links and that the way to do it is through mass reciprocal linking. I doubt many understand why that is seen as manipulative, especially if the links are somewhat relevant between sites.
On the other hand something like stuffing keywords in invisible text should more easily be seen as a manipulative practice and in that case it might make more sense to invoke a penalty.
A lot of seo deals in common sense, but there's also a lot that you wouldn't expect most outside of the community to know. Those who do and get things right should be rewarded, but should people who wouldn't be expected to know better be penalized? In some cases maybe, but in most of them I think discounting the manipulative practices should be enough.
Oh, did you miss the paid links debate after Matt's post in April?
Matt's posthttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
My post at SEJ after Matt updated his post in Mayhttps://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-update-on-paid-links-discussion-qa/4907/
Check it out.
Also interesting, the Wikipedia entry to nofollow (it's like a time line and summary of all this linking debacle)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
For a lot of people it's hard to figure out whether your sites have a penatly or just need more time to age and start ranking. I guess if you already had good rankings and lost them you can assume it's a penalty.
That and if you are looking for noncompetitive terms that you obviously should be ranking well for.
Good example Rand - thanks!
Rand, his PR bar is blank despite a 5/10 rank. Is this indicative of a penalty?
mrpitt, not sure what you mean by "PR bar is blank despite a 5/10 rank"? i see TBPR as a 5 on his home page.
regardless, in any situation where i've had or seen a site penalized, TBPR has always been a lagging indicator, as it's only updated quarterly. in the case of severe penalties related to spammy links and / or thin affiliate sites, i've usually seen the following occur, in order:
- traffic tanks due to dropping / disappearing keyword positions
- pages in the index are listed, but no longer cached
- pages lose all remaining despcriptive information (title, description)
- pages in index represented only as blue, clickable URLs
- these URLs begin to drop from the index
all of these can happen in a relatively short time frame, such that the TBPR still looks fine (5, 6, etc), all while the site is slowly dropping out of the index.
Maybe I am slow this month, but I still haven't read anywhere where anyone is speculating on what the infraction was that warranted the penalty. I can't believe that the penalty is just from participating in reciprocal linking, so is it because of too many reciprocal links in a short period of time, or links from irrelevant sources, etc?
Scott Harris made a posting on our blog about grey hat seo and also touched on reciprocal linking and how sites like phpbb have literally thousands of new reciprocal links added daily. So, I believe that would dispell the threshold of links per day theory.
Does anyone have any insight as to what the actual infraction was?
The penalty was at first limited to approximately 100 real estate agent sites that are (were) hosted by the same company. On April 15 each of these sites dropped approximately 30-50 positions in rankings. About a week later some of these sites made "reinclusion requests" and subsequently came back in the rankings, some to a lesser degree, about 30 days after that.In the meantime a smaller number of sites that were all built by another company were hit on May 9th. Most of these sites have yet to recover.What these penalized sites shared in common, for the most part, was a directory of state pages that had links to other real estate agents (referral/relocation partners) across the country.These links were compiled in some cases over a period of several years - too many links too fast was not the issue. They were all linking to other agents - not to sites outside of the real estate industry. All told approximately 150 sites (not thousands) have been penalized..
Wow...if that is true that I'm pretty disgusted. If it truly WAS b/c of those directories linking to agents nationwide, that is total BS. A real estate agent is very rarely a webmaster - they're a bit busy with REAL ESTATE TO SELL and can't spend all their time trying to figure out what Google may or may not screw them for.
Also, considering many agents make decent money on referrals, and have clients who may be looking to buy in another part of the U.S. there should be no reason why they can't link to nationwide-agents and have them link back to their site as well. Ok, if they link to thousands of agents, I can understand the problem, but if it's a few agents in each state - well, the U.S is big!
Anyway Jay, as I said, if what you're saying is the case (and it seems to make some sense, if those are the things those sites had in common) I'm more than a little peeved with Google. Thanks for sharing that.
Jay,
Thanks much for answering my question in a way that I could digest it. I made a blog entry at my site entitled Google's Real Estate Link Penalty Explained and I have cited you as the inspiration for the blog posting. I have conducted a search and I can not find a link to a website or blog of yours in any of your profiles. If you have a site or blog, please let me know where it is and I will add the link in my blog posting and give you props for the inspiration
I completely forgot about your post a few weeks ago, related to how to check to see if you have a Google Penalty. Very coincidentally, a friend of a friend (whom would not be happy if I posted the web address on SEOmoz) just got penalized for something completely out of their control (parasitic hosting it seems).
After cleaning up the site and locking it down, they just submitted the reinclusion request (but I am uncertain if they actually are using a Google Sitemaps account, so I need to ask). It will be interesting to see if/how Google reacts to a situation in which the webmaster was not fully in control of the situation - and - how that may effect the removal of a penalty, in terms of time.
In this case, the good thing is that they have a ton of high quality links, so I don't believe they should have long-term problems.
Interestingly enough, I just checked someone else's rankings that I know - who runs a region-specific site - and it looks like they got hit with a similar penalty (reciprocal linking) as the case in the post. Assuming that the reciprocal linking can be fixed quickly, I'll try to keep track of that timeframe as well (for the penalty getting lifted) and perhaps send a note or follow up.
I'd be interested to see that as well. We just found a ton of links on porn sites that nobody on our team put there. They used the full Title tag from the client's site and we saw a major drop across several key terms. The site didn't get banned but it was totally out of our control and filing a re-inclusion request wouldn't be appropriate.
I think that it would be good to give webmasters a chance to answer for issues that are completely out of their control but seem to affect their site. If there is some way to prove that they were not responsible, it would really work for them.
A lot of websites get away with this while others don't. I'd like to see this strategy to stop working and benefitting many while others get penalized for doing the same thing.
Mike
Rand, Google doesn't rank long tails the way it used to anymore. It prefers strong pages that targets the first few words of a long tail than weak pages that contain all the terms.
The terms have to be on the page. Google may be prefering strong sites but they still require that all the words are either on the page or in the anchor text.
I thought you'd get a kick out of this post I did after going through the pains with a friend of getting a site SERPs stricken from Google.
Some advice please, anyone? I'm no SEO expert and I'm getting desperate.
My real estate site looks like it's been hit with the same penalty as John Sabia as from late June.
The problem seems to be that we're a new-start (launched Autumn 2007) but some brainless SEO firm got us thousands of irrelevant inbound one-way links in 4 months by probably paying (they deny it) to get our links inserted in the footers of blog templates like this one https://www.joy01.com/ for anyone to download.
Question: I'm getting all the distributor sites to stop making the templates available. I'm also emailing every single blog owner to ask them to remove the link, but I reckon I'll have - maybe - a 40 to 50% success rate at best. What chance of Google looking favourably on my reconsideration request given that we'll never be 100% rid of these links?
At the moment we're laying good people off because our traffic's dead and we can't afford to pay them. My wife and I are watching helplessly as our business goes down the drain.
A new domain is not an option because we've invested our life savings in getting our existing brand name known.
Someone please tell me there's light at the end of the tunnel... (Bizarrely, one month after the penalty, our PR's just gone up to 4)
Thanks
Thank you for that! Very helpful [email protected]
I have a couple of real estate webs and i didn't have any idea of this. Well, everyone knows that is better to link without backlinking, but i didn't know about that penalty.
I'll have to have a look to all my links and change things on it.
Thank you very much, Pisocasas
[link removed]
Very our site actually benefited from the Panda Update and then got hit hard by the Penguin update so that was an interesting read
Middlegate Funding is a commission advance company that has been dedicated to honesty and integrity since its founding in 2013.
Hi,
I lost www.jintudesigns.com/color-floor-plan.html overnight, I don't know what triggers Google to do that. I don't have reciprocal links on that page. I used to rank #1 with the keywords "color floor plan". Now, even that particular url can not be found anymore. Luckily, I'm still ranking on yahoo with that keywords.
Please advise.
Thanks,
Jintu Montego
The same thing is happening to me on my site. unfortunately I read too many articles on reciprocal linking without reading this first. Our site HomeTryst.com Used to come up first for most address specific searches and now we're averaging 7th to 8th. Don't do it and don't hire overseas.
This is a great post. I wonder though, do these same rules apply for Yahoo? Can I use the same techniques to see if I have been banned at Yahoo or MSN? My site is doing well on Google (could be much better, and will be soon) but has yet to be indexed on Yahoo or MSN...
Thanks,Ed
Currently the other engines are not as stringent as Google with your backlinks. As an example (it's an approximate figure), but Google will only show about 1/4 of the backlinks that Yahoo will, give or take.
OMG..This would kill me! Thanks for providing this iunfo so I don't end up following his footsteps. You know brokers and other dumb agents try this stuff all the time..I can't imagine how many do this...and then end up in the same place.
Robin - you are only a year late to the party... but I guess, better late than never. First of all, I am not sure if you are implying that I am dumb, if so, I assure you that I am not. Since you wrote in your profile that you don't want to be the next john sabia like realtor slapped with a google penalty only leads me to the conclusion that you are someone with little tact and no class. Did you not think that this would be insulting to me? Could you not have made your point without including my name?
This article was written at a time when recip linking had been widely practiced by many website owners and seo's, not just real estate agents. It wasn't dumb, it was a method that worked at the time. Google instituted the penalty, hundreds of websites were penalized and website owners and seo's had no idea how to correct it after taking down the recip directories. Once corrected, would the penalty be lifted and how long would it take? Rand wrote this article as an education and his advice for the many website owners that were experiencing the penalty, not a license for you or anyone else to insult me and the other webiste owners who were penalized.
Moving forward a year... many of us came away from the penalty with a deeper respect for google and a clear understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. Many of us have not only recovered, but regained or improved our rankings. It was a lesson well learned.
However, one of the great positives I took away from this penalty was getting to know Rand and becoming a member at Seomoz. These 2 relationships far outweigh any penalty. I have learned more in one year than I could have ever expected and continue to learn everyday. Everyone brings a little something to the table which in turn allows everyone to leave the table with so much.
While I congratulate you on reading articles at SEOMoz, I would caution you not to insult those you may learn from.
John Sabia
So how was the conclusion reached that this is a reciprocal link penalty? What is this based on? If this is in the title of the post, shouldn't it be discussed in the post?
Gomer I asked the same question above. I am curious.
incrediblehelp, I missed your comment when I posted mine. I think we are in agreement.
Sure this may be reciprocal link penalties but there are penalties for other things as well. Matt mentions hidden text and there are of course many other types of penalities.
Can we say with aboslute certainty that a penalty was caused by one thing? I don't think so unless you work at Google. And it would probably take even Matt a fancy query or two to tell you what the problem was with a site.
I think there is a problem when we come out and say with certainty what is troubling a site when we should really phrase things as, "this is what we think is going on".
Hi,
I dont know about how exactly the penalty stuff realy works, but I have a question.
Is it always true for a sites main keywords to always rank first? above all?
For example, if i type in my sites info, and i use a keyword such as "justwantaquote read mortgage articles", shouldnt my sites home page, (and that keyword is also the first four words in my title tag), come up as number 1?
When I do this test, justwantaquote.com, is coming up about 4th.
Does this mean that I am in some sort of a google penalty?? I dont do any scheming tricks, just "nice hat" strategies, or white hat, which ever you prefer.
If anyone would like to share their thoughts, and I would definetely like to hear it.
Thanks.
"Is it always true for a sites main keywords to always rank first? above all?"
- No, it depends on how unique the main keywords or title tags are along with the authority of the site in question. The good thing about the sites ranking in front of you all reference your site and information. Much better than having competitors ahead of you. If someone wants to get your information the sites in front you have the ability to direct users to your site.
"For example, if i type in my sites info, and i use a keyword such as "justwantaquote read mortgage articles", shouldnt my sites home page, (and that keyword is also the first four words in my title tag), come up as number 1?"
- All things being equal you should be number one for that phrase but when that exact phrase is found on other sites with more authority than yours they will show up above you. I checked that phrase and saw that Ezine Articles, this post here, livedeal.ca, and Google Base all listed above your site. That is because these sites have more authority than your site and they will rank higher when you use that phrase for article advertising, etc like you are. According to Yahoo SiteExplorer you only have 15 backlinks while the sites above you have a lot more and therefore have more link love and will get better rankings when competing for the same terms.
"When I do this test, justwantaquote.com, is coming up about 4th."
- Actually, I just checked and you were number one for me. Congrats!!!
Does this mean that I am in some sort of a google penalty??
- Nope. Not a penalty. It just means you need to work on adding more unique content and getting more backlinks. Build youself up to an authority status and you will outrank the sites that are ranking ahead of you.
I'd love to see some examples of John's "very manipulative linking practices"?
This is a great example, Thank you
Here is my own example.
My blog, www.journalhome.com/billhutchison, used to rank hi on Google for my name, "Bill Hutchison". I was in the top three on Google and am still number 1 in Yahoo and number 9 in MSN. In Google I have now dropped to number "81".
I don't know what I did, or how it happened, but one day it was gone from the front page.
Strange but true...
I think it was a great idea from Google by penalizing real estate sites because I have real estate clients who seemed to hear from their counterparts around the country that the best way to rank was share reciprocal links. It was a really strange virus spreading around realtors in my opinion. But I can say that I noticed that the ones who were ranking the best, were keeping spiders from spidering the page that they were supposed to be sharing links with another realtor. On the flip side the ones who were ranking poorly were basically giving more relevance to the guy who was keeping the spiders off his link sharing page. He was a sneaky guy....So watch out ignorant realtors!!!
Wow...that's got to drive you crazy, I go nuts when a competitive term drops from #3 to #8. I can't imagine not finding yourself at all.
Thanks for sharing. Good stauff to know.
34 "Fort Lauderdale" terms on the home page seems to be a bit overkill. Perhaps the content can be cleaned up as well.
This looks like a filter, not a penalty. The site still has pagerank and shows multiple pages using site:JohnSabia.com. He also has no pages in the supplemental results.
So what happened?
Most likely it wasn't only a reciprocal link problem, but a site content problem. There is almost invisible keyword text in the footer, generic content, and standard MLS listings. There is nothing on this site that would qualify as linkbait.
This site could use a serious title tag rewrite. The page buying a home reads like a $9.95 text generator "buying a home| home buying| home buying tips| first time home buyer"
cvos,
Doing a site:www.johnsabia.com *** -adghasdtrb query it shows there are 206 pages in the supplemental directory.
Rand,
Good post. I also have one of the "penalized websites" and you can see the same search results diplayed when searching for my website. I to sit on the sidelines in the penalty box with a cleaned up website. I fully understand and accept my consequences. That said, it remains frutrating to those of us penalized without any clear understang of when we might be allowed to return to the game.
Anyone interested in doing some further research can look for ryanwardrealestate.com and see that this is definitely a penalty. That much is difficult to dispute.
The only advice I have for webmasters would be to remove ANYTHING that might resemble an attempt to enhance your search engine placement artficially.
Ryan Ward
Matt - good to meet you through the SEOMOZ blog. It would certainly be great if Google alerts the webmasters about anything that is an issue so that it could be sorted out on the fly. Amazing if this happens. :)))
A big thumbs up for "shot across the bow!" Well played.
It seems like getting back on Google's good side is like being in a relationship with someone who won't tell you what's wrong (and how you can fix it) but you know something is...that is so frustrating!
So, you know my wife??? Just kidding... :)
This is the same sort of penalty that Brad Fallon got with his myweddingfavors.com site. The good thing is that Brad had his guys clean things up and he is now back in the Top 10 under a search for wedding favors so their is hope!
Good post.
I hope you guys do a follow up post when his site is no longer penalized.
Do any of the other SE's have similar penalty issues, like we have seen with the real estate sector?
Yahoo has a penalty box. I was in it years ago(www.thesarasotamls.com) and am now in the Google penalty box. I think Yahoo got me for duplicate content.
I have not heard the latest but I know Advanced Access was penalized by Yahoo for a very long time. I believe over a year. I am not sure if they are out of it.
Great post Rand. I agree with Pocket SEO on the fact that Google should inform about the ban on the site and also the reason why it was banned. Also was stunned to know about the Yahoo penalty box. Thanks Marcin for that information.
Rand,
As always, thanks for your great examples and insight!
Big thanks to John for allowing his site to be shown for educational purposes.
Agreed. Not everyone would be willing to share this information. I imagine a link from SEOmoz is a pretty good incentive for sharing, but even then not everyone would share.
Thanks John.
Rand:I am glad to take part in contributing something educational here, I wish it were under better circumstances. I am also glad that this is being talked about, blogged about and information is getting out there. I wish the other penalized sites good luck, 5-10 weeks more? bummer.
John come on.."other dumb agents" insults you? No that wasn't an insult, it's a fact. There are quite a few dumb agents and brokers out there. do you disagree?
As for my profile..what in the heck is insulting about what I have in my profile...this whole article is about what happened to you. Did you ask Rand to remove your name?
My profile says: "real Estate Agent hoping not to become the next John Sabia-like Realtor"
If that's an insult then you need to have them remove this entire post. Adding the hyphen is to make the preceding word an adjective and is hardly an insult. You say you are not thin-skinned but your words say otherwise.
Relax, no one's insulting you. I am not going to use this forum to go back and forth with a realtor as to what is and what is not an insult, especially when the entire article was about you.
I could see if perhaps your name was denigrated without prior mention but let's be real here.
The reason I found this article was to specifically learn how NOT to do what you previously had done. Have you asked google to remove all references of the incident in question?
SEO is very important to me and that's why I'm here. Not to argue with you.
Robin:
I think we need to agree to disagree.
For the record, this entire article was not about me personally, rather about "what it looks like to be hit by googles real estate reciprocal link penalty" and my site used as an example with my permission and gratitude. Google it and you will see many versions of the article discussing the penalty. You chose to make it about me. If you learned from the article, great. That was the point.
I do agree that it is time to move on....Maybe we'll see each other at a showing and talk things out. Best of luck to you.
john sabia
I've been reading these threads and I have a question.
Isn't Google supposed to support ethical linking? I use LinksManager to aquire links that are useful to my Real estate clients. This is supposed to be a great way to get links that are not bad links. They are picked or approved by me, the realtor. I only pick links that will be of value to prospective clients. This is a database of sites who would like to link back with others. LinksManager claims to have consulted with Google as to the validity of these type of links and are thus given a thumbs up to their use. I've been using them for 2 years now. Is this going to hurt me?
Your opinions......please.
ahhh you hit the proverbial nail on the head. Google won't publically say "link exchange is ok" otherwise everyone is going to jump on that bandwagon. Instead, they have said "avoid EXCESSIVE reciprocal linking" which means avoid the fully automated services. Google wants you to use EDITORIAL DISCRETION in making links. Your service linksmanager supports that and appears to be legit. But they have alot of blackhat competition which is the rub. I think LinksManager is editor based so you should be ok.
I think the manual vs automated is not so cut and dry. Every recip link that was on my site was manually done by me. My site (www.johnsabia.com) still got hit with the penalty. Now, with regards to excessive, yes, I guess it depends on what is considered excessive.
Thank you for your input. One of the points that Linksmanager gives is that this service is all editorial based which is what they say Google wants. My links page is actually integrated by them and is hosted by them. I provide a text link on my home page to my links section. But I agree with John about what he asks what the definition of "excessive" is? How many? I've seen sites that had over a thousand links. I've got two websites and I have 700 on one and about 400 or so on the other. LinksManager is merely a conduit for finding links and I don't think that I have an excessive amount of them. And I have certainly refused requests from sites that I thought were not in line with my link strategy.
I guess I won't know for certain unless I get hit with a penalty.
I've got another question that is sort of off topic here but its something that I've been wondering about. Maybe I can get some feedback on this as well. All Real estate website have an IDX solution so potential clients can look at properties. I own about 40 other domain names for areas around San Diego and I was thinking of setting up area specific websites. But I don't want to pay for individual IDX pages for each. I was thinking of having a generic IDX search page from a 3rd party IDX provider and having all my websites link to that page for property search purposes. This page is also hosted on the providers server and not really attached to any one website. But the page would be branded to me.
Question:
Would these be considered 'doorway' pages? Do you think that Google woud penalize these sites for all pointing to a generic search page? The link to this search page would be a picture (jpg) of a button, which according to my research, spiders have a difficult time of reading.
Thank you again for your input.
John...dude you really need to chill! I had not read your comment until just now and seriously...if that was an insult you must be really thin skinned. I apologize if you were offended, that was not my intention. I was merely making light of the situation.
Geez...some realtors need to read Fark or the Huffington post and learn about satire, humor and jest...it's not all about themselves.
This is supposed to be fun! When it stops being fun at any level ...that's when I have to step out!
Robin:
Not thin skinned at all - you started your comment with "you know brokers and other dumb agents... " (insult #1)
Using my name in your profile statement in a negative way, where everyone can read it is not making light of a situation. (insult #2).
I accept your apology and would appreciate you removing my name from your profile.
FYI - I lean a bit more to the right, so Huffington Post is not on my reader.
and finally, some people should think before they speak/write - it's not only about themselves.
Hi all,
I personally think a lot of the ranking problem the site is facing is simply a matter of the sites keyword prominance + Frequency and experssion count.
I just ran the site through my analizer and the only longtail in the sweet spot (.75) was fort + lauderdale + real + estate
and hey presto no3. and that is rather good i think, for a big town in a high growth and competative real estate market.
everything else either fell short in occurrence .50 or was way to high .90
if he wants his "name" to be found he only need to include it in the home page another 1-2 times to improve it.
Just my two cents worth, and i hope it helps him out a bit from feeling like he is being victimized by G when he isnt
Kindest regards
Philski
John's website no longer has the penalty. The penalty dropped a couple of days ago. Search "John Sabia" and you will see his site come up #1 whereas before he was on the 4th or 5th page.
Rand, perhaps you can write a post about my website so the penalty gets dropped? ;-)