Hello all I have been watching this forum for a few weeks now. I am a real estate Broker in Las Vegas. I read through a lot of real estate and SEO forums. I came across this post on another forum and found it to be interesting. Since this was something I had been consdiering for my own website development. I would enjoy hearing some of your own conclusions.

This is a copy and paste from the other forum I visited.

This should be an interesting thread. I will start off by saying and yes I am just a Dumb realtor . I do believe google does penalize for link purchase because of what has happen to my own website. Here is a statement from google. Please all feel free to chime in and let the sparks fly.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d....htm#toc16167_4



There is an ongoing and increasing effort by “index spammers” to develop ways to manipulate our web search results. For example, because our web search technology ranks a web page’s relevance based in part on the importance of the web sites that link to it, people have attempted to link a group of web sites together to manipulate web search results. We take this problem very seriously because providing relevant information to users is critical to our success. If our efforts to combat these and other types of index spamming are unsuccessful, our reputation for delivering relevant information could be diminished. This could result in a decline in user traffic, which would damage our business.

Text-Matching Techniques. Our technology employs text-matching techniques that compare search queries with the content of web pages to help determine relevance. Our text-based scoring techniques do far more than count the number of times a search term appears on a web page. For example, our technology determines the proximity of individual search terms to each other on a given web page, and prioritizes results that have the search terms near each other. Many other aspects of a page’s content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question. By combining query independent measures such as PageRank with our text-matching techniques, we are able to deliver search results that are relevant to what people are trying to find.


Text advertising is NOT against googles Tos but when it is done to try and manipulate the serps it is..All it takes is for someone to file a report and show just cause why it is meant to manipulate and google will take action as I believe they have in relation to websites within the real estate industry

Its an interesting topic, and one that takes a lot of heat, however... here is the scoop. Google cannot penalize you for inbound links, the reason is there is no way to show that you are responsible for them, your competition could have just as easily purchased those links on your behalf and then reported you in an attempt to hinder your progress.

Google's attempted solution, the PR passon ban. Because they cannot touch your site, they simply add a PR passon ban to a site thats linking to you "IF" they believe its linking to irrelevant sites for pay. This is an exception and not the rules as I would say 99% of all sites that sell text link pass PR and credit just fine.

The fact is, one way links as long as they show in your backlinks are a benefit and help in your rankings. And you cannot be penalised for.

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Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles [Of Google] will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. Google.com