I was examining several real estate sites that are doing well in Google for SEO ideas and found a SEO technique to accumulate links. This particular method used 'junk' or meaningless web pages with ads to target their main sites. Some of the sites had articles and other fluff but they were obviously spam. I wouldn't call this white hat or black hat but rather gray hat. We know that Google is continually adjusting their alogs to eliminate this type of link "fixing" so deception doesn't make much sense in the long term, but it did spark an idea that I believe will play well with Google and the other Search Engines. There has been a lot of action over blogs and we know that Google treats blogs as content so why not use blogs to target sites with links. A link embedded in blog content should, theoretically, be worth more than a link buried deep on a 'link' page.

If anyone has a blog or would like to add a blog to their site and would like to pursue improved ways for linking contact me via PM or email.

Of course a link from a blog would be a good backlink, probably as good as a link from a real estate resource, as long as the blog is substantial. In substantial I mean that it isn't one page long and that it doesn't have anything to do with real estate. The plus side is that it's most likely always going to be original content.

If the blog were to have been operating for sometime and have many pages, and is also a real estate related blog. For example a blog of a realtor talking about the real estate market and houses for sale and the blog isn't diluted with too much non-relevant material than of course it would be a good link and would probably be better than a link from a state directory as the blog would be real estate specific, your almost guaranteed that it's original content, the blog itself would be continuously getting updated and larger and it would most likely have less outbound links per page.

The downside of course would be that a page in a blog that is finished would never change, therefore, the page would be spidered less and cached less frequently, whereas a page in a state directory would be updated more frequently because links and link descriptions would be added. Think on this more, I must. hehe.

Nice comments Jason. As time goes on I believe it will become more and more obvious that reciprocal linking is no longer fruitful. Anyone with a blog who would like to be on the cutting edge PM for more information.