What to do with links currently on state pages?

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

I created state and industry specific link pages yeas ago thinking that this would be of the greatest benefit to my link partners, therefore attracting link requests. This has worked and I have some of the better search engine rankings in my market. I have also used my own link pages as sources of referrals in other markets.

Now there is a lot of talk that this may actually be harmful to my own rankings. This has not happened to me yet but I do not want to take any chances.

What should we now do with these links? Just delete them and focus on other SEO techniques (i.e. articles, directories, unique content, etc.)? This seems drastic having invested 1000s of hours over the years on generating quality link exchanges.

What are others here doing? Has anyone seen evidence that trading quality links with other real estate sites causes a penalty? Or are people just erring on the side of caution?

Thanks for your thoughts!

[jessiesc]

I am still not decided on what to do with this topic and still researching.

We (Jennfer and I) met yesterday about this topic and discussed the options, pro and con:

1. Content Drive the pages and try a linking strategy to improve the trustworthyness of the pages thereby decreasing the supp indexing of the pages. If we fail and fall, hire someone to get us out of oblivion.

2. Delete the pages completely and start a new campaign and strategy.

So for the short term, while I research more...

What we decided to try is: Content driving these pages to see if that will offset this windfall (if it is even as bad as everyone is saying, to date we have only heard of one site being affected). If it works, great. If not and we fall off into oblivion, well life is a gamble and we will hire someone full time to pull us out.

While our site is new (less than 1 year) we rank very well for our area, page 1 G with a pr4 (whatever that does for it) and I am very hesitant about removing links that are working for us.

We are not in as highly a competitive market as many here, although our market is highly visible at the moment due to ongoing expansion etc.

[judyo]

Here's what I've gotten out of everything on REW and people I've spoken with. It isn't necessarily about reciprocal linking, it's about the actual state pages.

It supposedly doesn't matter if we use them truly for referral purposes and it doesn't matter if they're chock full of content or not. Because of supposed mis-use of these directory pages by the real estate industry, the whole concept of state pages has been flagged.

Up until Morgan's suggestion yesterday I started working on improving my state page's content. I have stopped doing that and will most likely remove them, too (even though I just got them out of supp. results on my Cook County site).

I have few recip links left to begin with and will be doing contextual links or blog post/article exchanges with those partners.

[Calculator]

"whole concept of state pages has been flagged."

Can you please provide a reference for this statement? I've been around the web since day one and this just doesn't compute to me.

[judyo]

I've sent you a PM. Again, what I wrote is what I have read here or have been told by those I have spoken to. I have absolutely no proof of what is right or what is wrong about this entire situation.

[Calculator]

Thanks for the PM Judyo. I wish somebody could provide some real proof what's going on.

I've read through all the threads and it looks to me like "state pages" have been convicted on very shaky circumstantial evidence from potentially biased witnesses. I'm open to hearing further testimony...

[brandonre]

What happen to the good old days of google when all you had to worry about was optimizing your site with meta tags and good content with keywords. Now they seem to put so much emphasis on links pointing to you which just seems so silly. So my site should be laced with my competitors links and drive away from my site. I look at a lot of real estate sites and directories and they provide no real value except that they have high page ranks and a million links pointing to them, so that makes them a good site in googles eyes?
I think more emphisis should be on good quality content and giving the consumer what they want, I'm trying to make my site go in that direction but also want to get good rankings, but it just seems such a tedious task worrying about getting links and there is so much contradictive information out there you don't know what to believe. Is anyone out there as frustrated at me?

By the way anyone interested in doing a contexual link exchange with me?
lol as they say when in rome

[JennSellsFast]

Those were the good ole days Dan. I think many of us are frustrated. Now instead of focusing on building good, informative, user friendly sites, many webmasters build an average site and SEO the crap out of it. The sad thing about it is that some of them achieve very high rankings. Finding good 1-ways is like treasure hunting. It's very rewarding but takes up much time. That time could be spent on better design, information, etc for the actual website.

[Jay Griffin]

The whole concept of Google from the beginning has been PageRank so if you got good rankings without taking that into consideration count yourself fortunate.

[brandonre]

Those were the good ole days Dan. I think many of us are frustrated. Now instead of focusing on building good, informative, user friendly sites, many webmasters build an average site and SEO the crap out of it. The sad thing about it is that some of them achieve very high rankings. Finding good 1-ways is like treasure hunting. It's very rewarding but takes up much time. That time could be spent on better design, information, etc for the actual website.

Yes I know I have been so intent on working on building links and such and takes up so much time when I should be working on providing good info for the consumer.Then you hear such things as providing outbound links such as local information and other useful links you want to provide your customer can penalize your rankings, it just makes me scratch my head. There is so much contractive info out there I don't even know what to believe. I think I have lost some of my mojo for the seo, I just plan on improving the design and info for my website and hope for the best and let the chips fall where the may.