Hey, I hope someone can help me with this. Almost every realtors website at the bottom of it has those ugly little banners spewed about such as reals.com, realestatelinkexchange.com, homeresearcher.com, etc. I was wondering why? Why do they have them? What is the point? If it's because you get a backlink from them, have you noticed the backlink actually doing anything for you? And if you pay for the link from them, why do you have to put a banner to them at the bottom of your main page? I dunno, I'm just confused as to why all these sites have these.

Cheers
Jason

If nothing else, I think there's an element of follow the leader involved. Seriously.

When I first started learning SEO I did what many do which was to find out who is at the top of the Search Engines. As I did this I noticed these "banners" that you are talking about. I figured hey it's a backlink, these guys are at the top of the pack and they're doing it so why not?

Of course, it only took a few more tutorials on SEO before I realized the error in my thinking and removed them.

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Top Sales Expert ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

I wish there was a way for people to know how bad they can be and stuff. Not only do they make a persons site look bad, but they could end up hurting someone's site instead of helping it. I plan to be at the top one day, but I'm not going to do it by dirty tricks or by setting the site up in a way that could hurt the people that help me.

That just gave me a good idea.

Maybe I'll put up a page that covers this and then asks for a reciprocal link at the bottom.

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Top Sales Expert ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

in your article you should reference the expert opinions of the members on this website and point them to this thread lol

Don't I always!

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Top Sales Expert ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

all of our members do, that's why we try to help them out as much as we can.

True Fact.

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Top Sales Expert ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

but i would like to get some other people's views on this topic

Privately not publicly.

Even Bill Clinton thought that he was acting in private, but made the mistake of including at least one other of the 6 billion inhabitants of the world.

Undoubtedly there are clever webmasters working for such directories who would enjoy finding your site.

Live and let live