Lot's of discussion on other forums about the effect that Googles devaluation of past credit given for links that where generated through reciprocal linking. There are even some interesting comments on Matt Cutts blog post regarding Google Hell that reveal what those who may be in the know think the effect of such a devaluation would be across all sites.

While many in the real estate biz seem to be effected in Google Serp's by something, perhaps it's the RE/SE Flu, if the cause of these demotions where due to reciprocal linking devaluation only don't you think that it would be an algorithmic change and furthermore something that would effect all websites, home or professionally made, in the same market in a similar manner?

If the recent demotions were caused by an algorithmic change related to the devaluation of reciprocal link values wouldn't you suspect that the sites remaining at the top of Serp's for popular searches would all be older websites with the largest accumulation of naturally occurring links? Is this the case in your market?

While I have no doubt that any value offered by a reciprocal link is ever dwindling, I believe we need to look at these demotions as a whole group and try to understand the commonality of the websites involved. What did they have in common? With out naming names, I know one of the RE website suppliers had encouraged their clients to link amongst their other clients, this could surely have sent up red flags at Google spam central monitoring.

It does not appear that these demotions are directly related to the supplier and all of their websites, as in each case some websites, from each supplier, remain near the top. At the same time, even considering the reality of dwindling reciprocal link power, which is easily witnessed in the reduced count of total link backs over time (you add more links, but your count at the SE's go down) I don't believe this is the root/only cause of this most recent demotion.

Care to accumulate a list of common factors and try to divine the real cause? Please post here.

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My allinanchor rank for 'city state real estate' went from #2 to not in the top 100. I take this as evidence of reciprocals being removed.

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Lydia Taylor, Realtor & Broker

Augusta GA Real Estate | North Augusta SC Real Estate | Augusta GA Home Search

I had about 100 recips, plus 40 context recips. I'm still #3 allinanchor for city state real estate. I have deleted all regular recip pages, but kept the contextual ones for now.

However, I do still have about 10 recips of directories including rew. What do you guys think about directory recips? Are they bad too?

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Hamid Grinage
Realtor
Prudential California Realty
510-384-9424

Oakland real estate
Oakland Condos
Piedmont Real Estate

This is not simply an algorithm to devalue recips (Although I am starting to suspect there is one involved coming in behind a manual intervention)

The reason I believe this that websites effected now cannot only not rank for their previously highly competitive phrases, they also cannot rank for obscure and non competitive terms such as their own names in quotation marks - these rankings (Obscure phrases) are pushed down to near identical levels of where the major terms dropped to.

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Don't miss out on the 12 days of Christmas promo

Ahh, ok. So it would be safe to assume that if Im still ranking for some long tails then I probably didnt get hit by this? I was never ranking except for allinanchor for any of my big kw's anyway, but of course Im trying to do all I can do avoid any penalty and keep the rankings I do have for long tails.

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Hamid Grinage
Realtor
Prudential California Realty
510-384-9424

Oakland real estate
Oakland Condos
Piedmont Real Estate

That is correct: Do a search for your name in quotes, if you aren't on the first page (Or you have an extremely competitive name) then you have a problem.

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Don't miss out on the 12 days of Christmas promo

I don't think the real cause of a SERP shakeup is evident yet. It's fairly strongly suspected that something in the PR algorithm was changed around the time of the last PR update. Many pages in a variety of subject areas lost PR during this update or didn't gain as much as suspected. Many folks feel that the PR "levels" were ratcheted up - others feel that G is weighting links differently. Right now there is a lot of speculation but not a lot of fact (if that's even possible). Some people saw older, more established pages with entrenched link structure gain ground in this recent update. Others saw older pages with an entrenched link structure lose ground. Take a look at this page of free directories: http://directorylist.sitedesigntutor...ortpr.php?pr=0 - just see how many slipped backwards in PR.

Another factor involved is that, like the real estate market, changes take time to reverberate. Things are not settled - even from the last PR update so any conclusions anyone can draw are going to be hypothetical at best.

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Eric Rogers - REALTOR
Century 21 Pro-Team
Aurora IL Real Estate | Batavia Real Estate
Yorkville Real Estate

As long as you trade links with high PR sites with relevant content you should stay high in the serps. The problem is people trade links with hundreds and thousands of PR0 sites which for the most part are no content.

I can turn a site into PR4 in a month by straight RSS feed submissions off my blog. Once that is done, I am able to start getting links off of people, and everything works itself out.

It's all about working hard, and if you spend your time writing content, and submitting articles you will rank #1 in just a few months.

PR moving up or down, as reported by the toolbar would not be the issue, the reason is the network (The internet) ebbs and flows with page rank relatively equally - also you typically do not see rankings changes of significance in tandem with a page rank update. Page rank updates have happened and effect the serps well before they are visible in a rollout.

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Don't miss out on the 12 days of Christmas promo

One of the big seo spokesmen for Google, if not the biggest, Matt Cutts has said on his blog that recip links are being given less weight. To take that another way -- recips are old and they're history! Maybe that's wrong but isn't there alot to what Matt says that way? He usually gives as much info as he can I think anyway and as we all know it all has to do with the algos.

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Mike
http://www.HousingPredictor.com
http://www.DestinFloridaRE.com
http://www.RealEstateDomain.com