I?ve read everything from purist to blackhat in the comments on the May 15th SEOMoz blog post, 17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid. The discussion board got rather firey and SEO?s weighed in with a lot of opinions. One thing is clear, Google has tightened up the reins a bit. This makes things a little tougher and a little better at the same time. I posted some thoughts of my own, which I share here. The impact of recent algorithm updates, especially the Penguin or over optimization update are important to anyone doing SEO for real estate.
Very interesting. Emotions running high on this topic. Money, lots of money is tied up in SEO and marketing.
Remember the days of FUD and Microsoft? Steve Ballmer was quoted with sayings like this: ?Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I?m not going to comment. But to the degree that that?s the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy.?
That kind of statement bears a familiar resemblance to some of those semi-cryptic ones by Mr. Cutts in any number of well-timed public announcements.
FUD. It?s what?s for dinner.
Why shouldn?t Google maximize the impact of its updates? Who doesn?t hate the kind of grotesque spam exemplified in the overoptimization announcement on the Google blog? Ultra-low quality deserves to be rooted out. Other than that, it seems like Google is reluctant to overly punish many kinds of links simply to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
A stronger focus on marketing is the shift that Google is rewarding and that really delivers the bottom line to our clients anyway but it?s a painful transition for a lot of businesses who never intended to get into ?show business.?
My own niche in real estate SEO illustrates this point. The last thing many real estate agents want to hear is that they have to start getting into what amounts to, in their view, entertainment. Blogging, Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus, Youtube videos? many agents quake in fear at getting in front of a video camera or even holding one. Then, to add insult to injury, when you look at many typical search results in many real estate markets such as ?Anaheim real estate? the top performers are not those who created imaginative content, blogs, and other types of the Matt Cutts utopian ?great content? but those sites that are the most impersonal syndication MLS listing sites: Trulia, Homes.com, Zillow. This forces agents to either expend large sums of time and money trying to outperform them in their markets or lining up to pay the referral fees that these sites demand. It is generally felt among agents that these websites exist for no other purpose than to force money out of real estate agent coffers by bullying them out of top positions in Google search results.
No doubt, those syndication sites generate leads but those kind of leads are the least valuable. Leads who want ?that house? that has been off the market for a month and always leads who are emotionally disconnected from the agent who never got a fair chance to introduce themselves and have some kind of rapport built up with the home buyer or seller.
My take is to be cautious in how you earn or build or attract links and don?t go off the deep end in forced anchor text but continue diversity in strategies, not just anchor text.
Dave Keys, not #1 today for ?real estate SEO? but I attract the most attention!
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