The Jagger Effect- Real estate websites totally disappeared!

Hi Guys,

Did you notice that?: all the real estate websites that used to get thousands of reciprocal links - which made them appear on the first results for any keyword...- are now gone from the natural rankings!

Now, instead of having wwwjohndoe-tucson-real-estate.com on the 1st result when you look for keywords like "buy a house in tucson", you have results coming from authority websites like www.homegain.com/subpages...

I remember last week I was analyzing the competition for one of our clients who's real estate related somewhere in CA. And for any keyword related to real estate in its business location, the 1st results were all tough competitors who had 1000ds of reciprocal links. thats the reason why I didnt like to work with real estate websites because competing with them was always Mission: SEO Impossible.

It looks like all the websites that have obtained an exaggerated number of reciprocal links have disappeared from the 1st results.

Do the test, for a keyword like " buy a home in xxxxcity" you will never find a single private website. For the real esate keywords, it looks like 90 percent of the results come from authority websites (like http://www.homegain.com/) that list other websites. By the way, the websites that they list have low PR and some of them do not show any BL.

So do you have any idea of how to compete with that kind of competition now???

See... this is the problem. There are websites like that all over the place now. And to really compete with them, you have to either make something so amazing that people just naturally link to you, or do some sort of link exchanges. I think Google is moving to ban all the big link exchangers soon. It's coming, and the real estate section was probably just a dip in the water to see if they could successfully pull it off with some degree of accuracy.

Hexed

yeah I had about 20 sites disapear on google, and a few thousand are gone in my area.
Google only has about 5 sites in my area and a ton of directories lited over an over again.

Again google should just ban all the sites and have a pay per click then it would solve there problem, instead of pretending to be a search engine.

this is already happening. looks at the current SERPs - just awfu! I would not be surprised if people stop using G in a very short time...

SSL - I don't think I can get behind that line of thought, but I would be curious if folks can provide a list of some searches to run at GG to illustrate this point... Anyone?

Indeed this update looked to hit hard Real Estates sites with tons of reciprocal...

There is a rumor I heared... that a site will be penalized if he links out to more than x links reported per number of pages. So pretending this number is 5 (random chosed by me) we may have 50 outgoing links if we have 10 pages, 250 outgoing links if we have 50 pages and so on.

Although I doubt the algo is so simple regarding this I also think that there is something like this that penalize sites that have huge number of outgoing links (even more if they're reciprocal links).

... just my 2 cents ...

Rand try this:


"real estate studio city"
"real estate carlsbad"
"real estate oceanside"

Last week, I was analyzing these top keywords for my clients competition, and the results were absolutely different! All the top websites were websites who had thousands of links and I dont remember having seen homegain.com as the first result.

Now For these 3 queries, a subpage from the domain homegain.com is always the 1st or second result out of milliions. The pages must have a good PR but they barley show back links ( 1 or 2)

How do you analyze this? Then, how do you think we can compete with these kind of pages?

Your only choice is to use adwords and Yahoo and Msn.

yeah I think people are gonna use Yahoo and MSn more often after this update which has definitely changed the landscape for a lot of markets..
For yahoo and msn, my websites already have a good ranking, especially on MSN, we'll see how the stats are gonna look like in the next couple of weeks!

The thing is Google says to improve your rank you need to increase links to your site, then they delete you if you have to many.

Why do you say people will use Yahoo and MSN more after this update?

Don't you mean that anyone who knows about "Google Updates" / SEOs may decide to have a look at other search engine results?

Anyone who is not in the area of "SEO" or "Geekdom" will have no clue and will continue to search for "real estate xxxxxx" and all their other searches. If they are getting results, and those results help, they really wont give a rats behind if the sites are different to ones a day, week, month or year ago. They are looking for information that helps.

Every time there is an update people come here and say "oh no, xxxxx area has been hit, my sites are down etc etc, this is a bad update, google are bad, use other search engines" we also get people who say quite the opposite. You can't please everyone all of the time, but the people that matter to google still get results and will still use the engine, people like us will also continue to use it, we will just bitch about what we don't like.

TTFN
Dave

Google never wanted you to do any SEO in the first place, don't pretend like they adviced you to get more links..

As usual it's not all black and white, the present Guidelines seem to encourage the acquisition of links:

"Have other relevant sites link to yours."

"Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online."

I'm not seeing real estate being crushed in our markets. If anything, local sites have grown stronger after this update.

Of course, I'm not using silly search terms that noone else uses either (like "real estate <city>" or "buy a house in <city>").

On yahoo!
linkdomain:www.homegain.com -site:homegain.com

returns a whooping figure of 307,000. So you are talking with one hell of a backlink love here....