Removing Advanced Access Links

[webmaster]

I was posted recently that AA sites are being removed from Google, thread located at http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread15141.html - this is the second major report of advanced access websites being removed from a search engine (The first being yahoo) although the yahoo ban was confirmed this Google penalty is not confirmed yet (Although there are many posts that suggest that it is a reality) so here is my question, how many of you are still linking to AA sites after the yahoo ban? How many will remove links to all AA sites now?

Personally, I have never seen much value in their links pages (At least the stock ones) so there were very few AA sites that I would ever link to anyways, but I am seriously considering advising my clients to just remove all links and quite possibly, even considering not allowing links to be posted here at REW to AA sites.

My concern is that AA with all their duplicate content, identical links pages on thousands of sites etc are being seen as a blanket bad neighborhood. Is this to harsh? I don't want my site to be brought down in reputation by linking to a recognized bad neighborhood, and although it is early, I think this has been coming for a long time.

I realize this is terrible for those AA users that are the rarity and have gone and customized their AA site with unique content and don't have duplicate links pages etc, but it seems that (At least from early reports) that the good are being thrown in with the bad.

How about you AA users, how do you feel about this? Am I jumping the gun, have you been effected by the behavior reported in that above thread? Has AA addressed this or sent out any statements?

[OCTeam]

.. the good are being thrown in with the bad.

How about you AA users, how do you feel about this? Am I jumping the gun, have you been effected by the behavior reported in that above thread? Has AA addressed this or sent out any statements?

Apparently AA sites are a target for whatever reason, and the good are being thrown in with the bad. My site AA has (or had now that it is gone) extensively customized content and I was one of the first to get de-indexed by G.
Since AA suggests to their own clients not to exchange links and/or to take their links pages down, I think REW should suggest the same about linking to AA sites. With some exceptions, not many of AA sites link exchange pages have much value now anyway. I do not think you are jumping the gun. I don't want any AA links on my REW site. No upside to doing it.
AA has an interesting future ahead....seems not much is going right there. However, being personally affected, I may have a jaded view.

[sdhomes]

It isn't harsh, it's just flat out wrong. It isn't a bad neighborhood. They were hit because of reciprocal links. This latest google problem is also only about reciprocal links, not network crosslinking. I guarantee you that your clients pages are not seen as any better than theirs.

You can't improve them, only remove them.

[webmaster]

Bob,
Although we have not agreed about the value of recip links for some time (As they were still very effective during 06) - By the end of 06 you and others started to really get me to take a long hard look at the future (Or lack thereof) of the realtor peer to peer reciprocal linking as it was being done for so long (50 some odd state pages, no value to the visitor, no content, no reason for Google to continue giving credit etc - By the end of 06 we had stopped all peer to peer state page links exchanges and quite simply don't do them any more - our challenge (And I guess AA's challenge) is cleanup and education.

You had mentioned in a recent thread that you got rid of all your links altogether and took a bit of a drop for the first time in years - it becomes very hard to convince someone who knows nothing else and has seen success with recips to drop them, especially because they will (For the short term) drop in rankings, at least from what I have seen.

I agreed with you in that other thread, and I "think" I agree with you here - stopping recip links was probably only the first thing we needed to do, we likely now should take a look at getting rid of those state directories (We didn't remove them, just stopped using them) -

[drewnick]

I came in and, uneducated, hit the ground running with reciprocal links. I didn't get much value out of them and I truly believe that for now it is more work than the links are worth. Half the time the link pages are being deindexed anyway.

[Sam Dodd]

I think the problem is the lack of content, massive amounts of outgoing links, and not so much the reciprical linking. Maybe I am one of the jaded 2006 sucess stories. Here is another issue I have with what you are saying. If people remove there link pages and see a drop, that tells me those exchanges had value. I mean really all content exchanges are is recip with content. Anyways I am excited to see where this goes. I personally will continue to do all types of exchanges and articles and directories and any other way I can get a link. I will focus on 1 ways of course but if the oppertunity presents itself to get a decent reciprical link I will take it. In fact, I have always believed google should look at the diversity of your links as part of the algo. This in my opinion would solve many of the problems they are facing currently. Anyways this rant is getting long and its lunch time.

[judyo]

I had done a clean-up of my Cook County site and kept few AA links to begin with. I don't go looking for recips anymore. I did clean my site up of all incoming links from supplemental pages, which got rid of a lot of recip partners to begin with. However, I still kept partners that had indexed pages.

Now, for the first time, I'm considering getting rid of all of my state pages, AA links on them or not. Just when I started getting them back in G's main index - wouldn't 'ya know.

On one hand I'm afraid I'm being too reactive - this newest AA problem is scary. On the other hand, this talk has been going on for some time (right Bob?).

My site has been hitting more top spots lately and moving other sites down (I only have one AA site I know of in competition with me and his site was still in some top spots I'm fighting for when I checked yesterday). Do I take a chance and remove all of my state pages or leave well enough alone and hope I don't get "dumped?"

Decisions, decisions...

[Calgary Agent]

Judy - I'm not inclined to wait and watch the other shoe drop. As Bob mentioned (elsewhere?), should Google de-index your site it will kill all the authority we've worked so hard to build.

Off the top of my head I think I have two choices:

1. Add nofollow tags to all outbound "resource" links
2. Completely remove the state pages

[VRI]

Cedar, the dropping of the pages had nothing to do with the content or outbounds and everything to do with the lack of inbounds and/or internal link structure.

For anyone thinking of dropping anything, I hope the first priority will be to contact each webmaster of the specific sites if removed.

[sdhomes]

It is simple risk to benefit.

Keep them and you risk everything for at least 30 days, while you gain a handful of links that may not be even indexed in the future.

Lose them and you avoid getting nuked, but you also lose a few inbound links that may be helping you and you drop a few slots until you gain better links from better sources.

If your rankings are dependent on those links, then you are in trouble anyways and just don't know it.

Thinking this is just an AA thing doesn't make sense, since in this case it was not Yahoo, but Google. Many of the sites that have been hit were not linking as much with other AA sites as they were with sites like those represented here, so that should at the very least make you nervous.

Doesn't anyone else see a pattern here? Matt announces on Saturday, after SES, that they want feedback on paid links to help improve their detection methods and on the same day sites in an industry that both Y! and G said was going to be cleaned up, are hit?

Is it that much of a stretch to assume that with an initial sampling of sites, Google could pretty easily map out the recip link patterns in a niche where a large % are all real estate related? After all, crawling the web from link to link tracking and gathering information is at the core of what they do.

Camouflage or "re-engineer" them all you want, but it won't protect them. Dilute them down across far more pages with higher link to content density may help a bit, but now you dilute the link equity of your site and will see more pages go supplemental. You do this at the expense of the pages that actually are important to you visitors; pages that drive traffic that converts.

There are better ways to get links.