Page 2 - The Jagger Effect- Real estate websites totally disappeared!

i got hit by this Jagger-update the same way as other do. My main competitor just vanished from Google index (not even a single page indexed).

What I want to say is that the whole Google Index it seems to be jaggering ;) as a few hours ago searching by "accommodation in bucharest" I had 4.130.000 results and now I have 670.000 on the main site and 674.000 on www2 and www3. Google is defenitely dancing my brains out as the client went bambooocha when realized that the trafic reduced to half, comparing to previous month.

I say we should wait a few more days until the Jagger storm passes and then try to find which are the right measures to take. IMHO it's prematurely to decide somethig or to try to test something as the results are not stable.

The SERPs for our main RE related terms have not changed much at all. There is the occasional drop from the SERPs but that usually only lasts for a day or two as things seem to finally be sorting themselves out. Of course I think I am into competitive enough terms that I am stuck dealing with the usual suspects. Real Estate is one of the most competitive areas so a lot of people have engaged heavily in link exchanges. If Jagger did indeed target recip links, it would only make sense that it would shake up the RE related results.

Unfortunately, those who just want to complain in anger can't be bothered with such trivial things as facts.

Again you are not make any sense or any point. You are in denial of the obvious.

The real estate sites that were hit on this update.
Had a majority of reciprocal links.
Sites that have 1 way links from a home page were not.
Since many realtors sites have reciprocal link programs many were knocked out.
Google is a bit slow in the head. 300 one way links is not spam but 100 reciprocal links is spam. Go figure they should have just devalued them
not put them back in the box again.

I can attest the same has happened in "satellite radio". This is my industry, several websites that have been link building were scratched from the SERPs. I've noticed a lot more "naturally" well ranking sites inthe top results, sites like, about.com, howstuffworks.com, amazon.com, cnn.com. Literally the first 1-2 pgs of most top level words are full of these type of pages.

I am a realtor and I have 2 real estate sites here in the Southern Utah area that I designed and do the SEO work for. http://www.golfcountryhomes.com and http://www.utah-homes-online.com. Golf Country Homes has owned the market here for about the past year for almost any relevant search and still does.

I put Utah Homes Online together to test my SEO skills because it is a template site and harder to SEO and I wanted to see if I could match the results from my first site. It is still pretty new and sandboxed by Google but I am getting some very favorable results with MSN and the allin’s at McDars are looking good. MSN (for me) always seems to be a good indicator of how I will do with Yahoo and Google.

I do alot of link trading (No adult, hate, porn or Viagra etc.) for both sites. I did take a small hit during the last update however it wasn't for my main/targeted keywords. I am still #1 for my target keywords. I did lose a couple of slots for things like just entering just the cities name or a term like “Beautiful Homes”. Was at #3 and now at #8 for those but still getting plenty of traffic and leads.

I am sure there are lots of you who won't agree but I think that if you do everything you can (White Hat) to move your site up that you eventually reap the rewards. Unfortunately link trading is one of them. I still use meta tags, and try to use my keywords in my text without making it look like keyword stuffing. I still submit to the search engines every Sunday. Lastly you have to have something to offer your visitors so I do as much as I can to make the site user friendly and rich in content. I've heard lots of times that some of the things I do are irrelevant now but I stick to what has worked for me in the past.

The point is, I don't fit the mold many of you are describing. Check Golf Country out in any of the search engines. I'm still going strong and fully expect to be even stronger following the next update. I always drop back a little during each update and come back even stronger later. No reason for me to believe that this is any different than any other update. The longer the site exists the smaller the drop back each time as well.

Bottom line is, the person that works the hardest and smartest will make it to the finish line. Not every step is a step forward. Sometimes you need to do a little backtracking as well.

Check out http://comparesearchengines.dogpile.com. It shows how far off results can be for MSN, Google and Yahoo. End up in the center ring where my site does and you must be doing something right. Just my observation.

Cheers!

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Here's my point of view about this update and how the new SERPS are affected by the changes:

- sites that were counting only on reciprocal links (no matter what kind of links, just the more the better) dropped significant in SERPS showing a probable devaulation of the reciprocal links (at least if they're the only/the most source of backlinks for a site)
- sites that were counting only on reciprocal 3-way links (no matter what kind of links, just the more the better) dropped slightly in SERPS, showing probably a slight devaluation of reciprocal 3-way links.
- sites that were counting on reciprocal (either 2-way or 3-way) quality links slightly increased in SERPS, showing probably a slighthly higher importance of quality reciprocal links (or most probably of general quality links)
- sites that were counting on one-way links (the more, the better) reported different results (some reported improvments, while some other reported drops in SERPS).
- site that were counting on quality, one-way links raised a lot in SERPS, proving that probably this is the key to the next SEO strategies (anyway we all knew that since long time ago, but we are just to lazy to chose the hardest way, isn't it?).

Sorry if my point of view bothers anyone. I don't have the pretention that it's the "Absolute truth" but it is documented on quite a lot of personal analyzes and statistics on other people points of view.

So, question in point. How does a company advertising a product (house or otherwise) gain a lot of natural links? I agree with reciprocals being a problem in the SE's, but I'm still not sure natural links are the best way to rank web sites for some keywords just because of their web environment. I also want to say from looking at my keywords that age of the site is now playing a bigger part in SERPs.

Yes, age matters
But there are some sites just a few that are 6 months old with 20000 blinks and in the top three. How do they get there without getting in the sandbox. Do they know matt??

Well, after taking another look at things, my sites may just still be in the update period, because I have a lot of google bots coming by and I'm ranking low for even uncompetitive terms. If the positions stand for my real estate sites though, I really will need Matt Cutts to fill me in on what's going on, because I can guarantee even if you did take out my reciprocals, that I still have much better content, one-way links, and on-page-SEO on my site. At least good enough to not be on page 3.

Um there are TONS of threads and articles out there talking about how to gain links and if you don't think natural links are the best then I have to disagree with you on that. It may not be EASY to get a ton of natural links, but those are most definitely the best ones to have.

Isn't this kind of like all the inmates saying "I'm innocent"? I mean don't we all think that our content is best and our page deserves to rank higher? In the end, its only G's opinion of our site that matters in the SERPs.