Real Estate Web Design

Link Exchange Debate - How to move Forward

The debate over link exchanges has been going on since the inception of Google so the current uproar in the search engine community is nothing new. Every year or two, the search engines make various changes to their algorithms which affect a block of websites. In almost all these cases, the block of websites which are affected are templated websites.

In regard to real estate websites, the current uproar started last year after AA (Advanced Access) websites were hugely affected in Yahoo with many of them losing rankings they have had for many years. The issue this year again involves AA websites as due to a recent change in Google, many of these websites have lost their rankings in Google.

In general, this would not affect any Site Tutor websites. However, it is now being recommended by a number of custom real estate web design companies that they not only stop any type of straight linking program between websites, but actually remove these pages with the links all together. When this happens, there will be an affect on Site Tutor websites. It will not have an immediate affect, but it will have an affect over time.

As you all know by know, Site Tutor has always felt that although link marketing is a necessary evil in regard to internet marketing, over the long term, a scenario similar to the one being outlined above would happen. This is not a “told you so” post. I only mention this to emphasize the importance we have always placed on diversifying your internet marketing activities and focusing on the long term approach to search engine optimization.

Site Tutor has always had a linking policy with some of the following guidelines:

• Unless requested by the client, no links with templated websites
• All link partners are verified as established / committed / knowledgeable website owners
• All sites have been indexed in ALL 3 search engines and all link pages have been indexed as well.

Because of this strict policy, we have not been affected by many of the ranking fluctuations that have affected other websites. We also feel that because of this policy, the current structure of our links pages actually continue to help our clients. Not as much as in the past, but more importantly, they do not hurt our clients websites. However, just because we feel we implemented to solid strategy in the past, we were always dependent on the strategies of our link partners. It is that dependence which has forced us to create a proactive approach to these coming changes.

HOW TO HANDLE THIS CURRENT CHANGE AND MINIMIZE ANY AFFECTS

1. First and most importantly, you need to check all your reciprocal links on your website to make sure the sites you are linking to are linking back to you. Over the next 3-6 months, we recommend checking these links once a month. Any links which are no longer linking to your website should be forwarded to tutor@sitetutor.com for removal.
2. If you do not have a blog on your website, we recommend you have one installed. The cost to install a blog on your website is ($100). Customization of the Blog is billed on an hourly basis of $60.
3. If you have a blog on your website, make the effort to post in your blog a minimum of once a week. This will add additional content to your overall website and strengthen the value of your website in the search engines. I will have further posts in the blog to outline how to best use your blog to maximize your efforts. If you would like to have a consultation meeting, this is charged at $75 per hour.
4. If you are not actively a member of a popular real estate forum. Sign-up and begin contributing to the community. Our forum is one of the top real estate fourms on the web and a great place to network online and benefit your search engine optimization activities.
5. If you have been thinking about adding additional changes to your website, now would be a good time.
6. If you have not paid for a Yahoo directory listing, I would consider the investment. It is $299 per year, but depending on the power you may lose from having sites which were linking to you no longer linking to you, the power from one yahoo link could greatly help to offset that loss. For many of you, in the past I had mentioned that Yahoo was something to keep in your back pocket in case we were not able to receive rankings through other sources, now is the time to get that Yahoo link.

These are some of the initial action steps we recommend our clients to implement to combat the loss of links from other websites. As always, please feel free to contact us for clarification and or assistance. The money and time invested at this stage is unfortunate but necessary. The internet marketing process is no different from off line marketing in the sense that there are occasionally expenses which were not in the budget, but are important enough to re-look at the budget and prioritize. This is one of those times.

In future posts, I will outline the contextual linking strategy which is being implemented by many custom website owners. This approach is nothing new, but given the various changes in the search engine community, it is now the recommended strategy. The reason many people delayed implementing this approach is due to the fact that it is very labor intensive and thus expensive to implement.

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