Google Real Estate Penalty Damper – Google 100 Penalty – April / May 2007

Did your real estate site used to rank top 20 in Google and now it ranks 120 or worse?

The client

Numerous sites on the same server (shared IP)
All the sites are built in template fashion
All the sites have unique content and domain names
All the sites are real estate lead generation
All the sites had participated in reciprocal link building

Where they used to rank

4-6 months after launch the sites ranked top 20 for their most competitive term “city real estate”

The Problem

Around the end of April 2007, all their sites disappeared from the top 20 and re-appeared in the hundreds (usually 110-150)
Many of the sites lost pages to the supplemental index

At SMX in Seattle I heard both Matt Cutts (Google) and Tim Mayer (Yahoo) openly discussed real estate websites and over optimization techniques (reciprocal linking). Both said they were taking a more proactive look at this industry and we’re bothered by excessive linking.

Solutions we tested – using individual sites we tried a number of tests to see what would work

Deep linking
De-optimizing
Using the robots.txt to block similar pages or folders
New design
Breaking the site out of the template
New hosting
Buying a unique IP for the site
New titles and descriptions
New file structure
Removing all link pages
Cleaning the link pages (limiting the number of links)
Deleting the link pages all together
Changing the nature of the links (locally based)
Removing duplicate links

The winning strategy

Change the nature of your links
- Put links into the content
- Make your links locally based
- Remove excessive linking from your reciprocal pages
- Remove duplicate links
Offer links to reputable local businesses and top competitors
Place links to your site on local boards – links with value
Tweak your copy to make sure it is locally based
Make sure that your site is properly themed to your city

Note: don’t panic, your problems can be fixed, it may take some time, but your site still has value. Change the way you optimize, take a much more local approach.

The results 60-90 days later – the sites started to reappear in the top 1-20 of Google again.