Please let me know your take on paid links and why google thinks they are bad?

Here's my take. Links are just advertising. Major corporations spend millions of dollars on advertising every year, they even hire sports figures and popular actors to shlep their products for them. You can also find their ads all over the internet on sites from CNN to EBAY.

So whats the difference if Realtors want to buy a couple thousand links?

Life is not fair and never has been, If I've got $20,000 to spend on links from all over the internet why should google frown upon it? Hell, google even sells links themselves to the highest bidder for adwords.

Your opinions please....

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Coastal Delaware Real Estate Sales
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My take on that is with 20K to spend on links you can inflate page rank and PR to a extreme level and put a website that is a total piece of garbage on top of the serps and how does that help googles customers, the people searching on google??? That is why I cannot understand why google does not act on some of the 4 and 5 year old real estate websites which are 90% paid links or more. For the most part they offer boiler plate info that can be had on one of a 100 websites and a picture of the agent. I don't get it....

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James Boyer
RE/MAX Properties Unlimited
Morristown, NJ 07960
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Serving the Real Estate markets of Morristown, Morris Township, Madison NJ Real Estate, Chatham NJ , Summit, Short Hills, Millburn, Maplewood, South Orange, & West Orange Referals happily given and accepted. For information on home sales in New Jersey please contact. Morristown NJ Real Estate Madison NJ Real Estate Chatham NJ Real Estate

With $200,000,000 Nike can put ads on TV, radio, newspapers and magazine and sell a $20 shoe for $120

How is this any different?

I don't believe there are any mom and pop sites left on the web that rank well strictly because they are great sites. You have to market them and as soon as you do it's just a race to see who can promote the most hype, the most text links or the most content. You can do these things yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

I know for a fact that there are a lot of Realtors who pay people to write blog articles and website content for their sites. Is this fair? It's just more paid advertising/marketing.

I'm also guessing most of us have paid to have our websites built. Is it fair that he who spends the most on his site should be at the top of the SERPS?

The world ain't fair so why should it be a crime to buy links?

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Coastal Delaware Real Estate Sales
REHOBOTH BEACH CONDOS | REHOBOTH BEACH REAL ESTATE | REHOBOTH BEACH MOBILE HOMES
* Results not typical. Individual results may vary.

Mike -

Google's position is that paid links create worse search results. They say that paid links artificially increase the rankings of sites. People didn't naturally link to the site, the votes were purchased. They're not advocating that we stop advertising, but they're attempting to take away the added benefit of PR from advertising on directories & other sites.

Also, it will ultimately help their own advertising revenue.

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Eric Bramlett

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I had purchased some links in early 2007 then received a Google penalty for having a state reciprocal link directory, of which had nothing to do with the paid links. Thankfully, I hadn't purchased too many, but before I submitted my reinclusion request for the state reciprocal link directory I knew I had be 'clean.'

Anyway, I got rid of the state reciprocal link directory, as well as any paid links and during the process of getting rid of the paid links, it occurred to me how easy it is to spot a paid link.

Regardless of how you feel about paid links, your competitors will certainly see them and will wait until you are striking distance of the #1 spot, then file a paid link report.

I would strongly discouraged paid links, as well as other forms of linking (excessive contextual links and/or reciprocal linking) that will get you penalized.

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I'm not promoting paid links, I'm just wondering how it's any different than any other paid marketing.

Pretty amazing that Google will let you buy paid links from them but penalize you if you buy them from anyone else!
LOL, Who naturally links to a real estate site? Who are you kidding I track 1000 local real estate sites (my local competitors) The ones who do not promote are lucky to have 5 inbound links. Those on the front page of google have 4000+ inbounds.

There are many low ranking sites in my list of 1000 who have sites that are just as user friendly, good looking and even well written with the only difference between them and those on top being their "Marketing methods"

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Coastal Delaware Real Estate Sales
REHOBOTH BEACH CONDOS | REHOBOTH BEACH REAL ESTATE | REHOBOTH BEACH MOBILE HOMES
* Results not typical. Individual results may vary.

Google doesn't want webmasters buying/selling paid links that pass "PageRank". You don't violate the guidelines if you designate the paid links as such which can be done by:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google covers this here: http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=66736

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Interesting, I didn't know you could report paid links. Think this is what happened with the recent REW SERP issue?

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Brandon Hodges
(405)755-4422
Edmond Real Estate
Edmond homes for sale
Edmond Realtor

The difference is that buying links from them doesn't help you organically rank.

That's pretty funny...I was talking w/ one of my competitors the other day & we were discussing "unnatural linking." We said the same thing - well, an RE site w/ 20,000 backlinks isn't very natural.

I do think that google is getting good at determining natural links, though. IMO, a diverse link portfolio is going to become more and more important as we move forward.

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

Agreed about diversified links and I will add a little more to the mix here and it probably goes against most of what we hear and read.

In the real world, links from semi to non relevant websites would actually be much more natural than links from a bunch of real estate websites of which most are competitors of some form or another.

I don't claim to know how Google ranks websites, but, as they continually get better I would be very surprised if non related links don't become more heavily weighted.

If you think about it, votes from respected sites outside of real estate should probably weigh as much or more than related websites, which is more like nepotism than true value.

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Ryan Ward, REALTOR® - Keller Williams Realty Consultants. (404) 630-3187
Atlanta Real Estate - My featured area is Alpharetta Real Estate and it is where I call home. Read my Atlanta Real Estate blog.