hispdcha - 11:54 pm on Apr 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

Is Google scoring verticals differently ? e.g. shopping , real-estate , travel.

I definitely think Google ranks web pages in the real estate vertical oddly. For example, if you look at some of the highest ranking real estate sites they are all involved in some sort of reciprocal link scheme.

They also use keyword rich anchor text religiously. I know SEOMoz brought this up with the highest ranking real estate site in Nashville, TN. I don't know if I can link to the SEOMoz study, but you can find it by Googleing competitive backlink analysis seomoz.

I talk to quite a lot of real estate webmasters (100's+) on forums. Not one of them has said anything about panda affecting their rankings. I also run a blog that has general real estate articles on it, and recently it took over some top spots from about.com. :)