As it pertains to Yahoo! you might want to consider who you are linking to and vice-versa if you are building state pages. Advanced Access (including Greg Boser aka WebGuerrilla who they have hired as a consultant) is telling their clients to remove the links on state pages. This is because of a penalty that has dropped most of these sites drastically. One site that was ranked on #1 on Yahoo! last week is now in the 180's. Over 30,000 sites have been affected.

Here is an exerpt of a rather lengthy email they sent last week to their Premium Marketing Package Owners:

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As your Website Marketing Specialist, I am advising you that your Realtor to Realtor links on your "States Pages" be deleted right now to help your search engine rankings. These link are not helping you and need to be deleted.

This is obviously big news and I know it may seem very frightening to do. The main point here is that peer to peer linking is not valuable to your search engine rankings and is harming you. Please let me know at once if I can remove these links for you. I would be more than happy to take care of the work for you.

What Has Led To This Advisement?

In March of this year we became concerned (as many of our Marketing Package clients did) about current Yahoo rankings for those in our Advanced Access family. We performed many tests on our network to slowly experiment if we could change anything for the better on our clients rankings. Those experiments were varied and included removing links from sites, changin g our server configuration, and moving sites around on different IP blocks. With the exception of a week in April and three weeks in May when all rankings suddenly came back, only to drop again, we remained concerned. While it is true that many other real estate websites that are not affiliated with Advanced Access were no longer in the Top 10 of Yahoo's search results, we have so many fantastic websites that it was baffling that the rankings were gone so suddenly.