I'd love your thoughts after reading these 2 articles. Most of my state pages do not have articles on them--I asked for some in the past thinking surely people would jump on the chance for free contextual links to themselves and nobody sent me any articles.

Are these state pages going to be a negative on our rankings in the future or will they just be ignored/discarded by google? I got wind of this article at the REW blog by Spoken Gently: http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/...tly/1084/show/

Please read it and send me some of your collective expertise...especially Kid Disco

The whole task of building quality local links (http://www.advancedaccess.com/market...rketing292.htm) seems time consuming. Although with local bloggers one could probably do it most efficiently.

jay

She quoted this article:
http://www.advancedaccess.com/marketing/0333.html

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Hi Jay

This is my 2 cents could be right or wrong, I'll let the other members comment on this. It's my belief that google is getting more localised so more local industry relevant links would be better. I can't comment on this from a U.S. point of few, I'm based in Ireland but I have noticed it with Ireland and U.K. searches.

In regards to the articles, I think your going about it the wrong way. People that are writing articles already have invested time in writing them, why should they spend more time seeking you out when they can post them to 100's of article sites and let you get them yourself. The other thing that confuses me is why you'd give away your google juice, you want people linking to you not the other way round.

Link baiting/building is time consuming and it should be otherwise we'd all be top of the serps. Just one last thing about the articles. My view on articles is a bit like the daily newspapers. They all have the same stories written from a differnt point of view. If you come across an article that you like and think your readers would like it, why not get it rewritten as unique content (I use copyscape to make sure its unique). That way you now have your articles (unique content as well). You can now add this to your site and use it as link bait to build your rank.

DRang3d

Until I see that Google completely deindexes all state links pages everywhere, I will continue trading links. I've said this before, it's tough for a local little real estate site to get good one-way links to it. If we all waited for that to happen we'd be wallowing in the deeper areas of the serps.

I continue trading links via paid one-ways from directories, blog & site article exchanges, recip resource page trades and contextual link trades. Jay, I'll give you a write up for your IL page as long as it's indexed.

I work in 40+ different cities and this is the way for me to build all of these different anchor texts. Only MSN rewards me for my site's good content and I have many top positions there for cities I haven't given out any anchor text for.

With Google, I have to get that anchor text out there or I won't appear on the first page for the many towns I cover. The good thing is that now that my site has aged it doesn't take that many trades to get those towns appearing on the first page and even make it to the top.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

I apologize, I am not trying to hi-jack your thread. I went to your site, and I like it, you have done a good job. I really liked the use of YouTube in lieu of a virtual tour. Much more personalized and informative. I hope you don't mind, but I may borrow that idea at some point in the future.

As far as the context links. I would be more than happy to do a write up on Tennessee for you, but you have some things that need fixing. Your Resource page is off alignment and pushed down to the bottom. And, you have too many links on the first page. Those links should be placed in their respective pages with in the resource page. If I am not mistaken, the general rule of thumb currently is five links maximum to gain a positive affect of the inbound link. I understand wanting to put them on a page that has PR, but with that many links it is carrying little value to those folks with so many links.

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Jay, I'm seeing your resource page just fine in Firefox so maybe you fixed it. The reason I wouldn't really care to send a write up to your IL page is because it's not indexed. Just adding content might not be enough to get it indexed.

What you need to do is what I did. I started trading blog articles with links to my state pages. I didn't have to send out 50 links but all or almost all of my state pages are back in Google's main index just by doing this with several pages. I also used my REW blog to get these pages reindexed.

Now, at the same time I added all of my state pages to my home page footer and to the footer of each resource page. I will try an experiment of removing those footer links on the individual resource pages that I have trades on because these are adding to the total amount of links per page.

Ed mentioned 5 outbound links per page, I just try to keep my total links on a page to 50 or less which gives me more than 5 partners per page. By total links I mean inbound and outbound.

It will be interesting to see if removing my state links from my footer will cause my pages to be thrown back into supplemental results or if the inbound links I've received will be enough.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

If I get an article for a state page I'll put up a link to it (state page) on my homepage and get it indexed promptly. I've gotten pages indexed quickly this way often.
J

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Memphis, where are you pulling that information from, can you advise?

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I'm not speaking for Ed (Memphis), but giving my own opinion. 5 outbound links on a resource page is ideal. That way you're not sharing the "link love" with too many other sites.

However, on some popular state pages such as FL, AZ & CA, we'd have to start creating many multiple pages if we limited each page to 5 outbound links. That's why I try to limit myself to around 20 partner links plus my interior site links.

I'm not sure how accurate Link Appeal is but it started showing "computed link appeal" again (wasn't showing this for much of last year). This gives me an idea of how watered down PR gets when there's too many other external links sharing a page. However, I am noticing that it is counting internal links in the total of all "external links."

I've always felt that a link is a link and PR gets watered down by the total amount of links per page. Some webmasters aren't concerned about internal links although I believe they should appear in the page source after the reciprocal link partner's links so if Googlebot stops going down the page at least your partner's links get spidered.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

Judy expanded the thought process quite nicely (thanks Judy). I should have expanded it a little. It has been talked about quite a bit here and other places. Judy has the same opinions I do as far as the numbers go. The "new" consensus appears to be around 20 links on resource pages to share the "link love".

Where I got the 5 from was a general consensus of some that 5 links per page when using a context link exchange method is sort of "ideal". Since we were referring to adding content to the page and making it a content worthy page instead of a simple link listing, I went with the number 5.

These are just opinions (especially when I speak), due to change hourly with new algorithm updates.

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Your article and its links are up.
http://www.justnewlistings.com/massachusetts.html
I also added h1and jpeg SEO elements for you on the long shot that it can get some rankings. Title of the page changed as well for your goals. It was last cached by google on 3/30/2007. I'll put a temp link to on the homepage so that it gets cached again.

Best of luck and if I have time I'll send you an article. Problem is having time when I have 3 kids, etc.

jay

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Northern Virginia condo -- Cutting edge search tools for Arlington VA Real Estate, Alexandria VA Real Estate, and Washington DC
Condos