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.