Has anyone heard of this?

Crackdown on realty sites that exchange links

[dickbaker]

Moderators, I hope I can use the word "realty," as I haven't read about this particular story here on WW. I read about it on a realty site.

Google has supposedly banned or punished a goodly number of realty sites because of link exchanges. Site A in one state links to Site B in another, and vice versa.

Matt Cutts had some comments to make on his blog about it, another blogger interviewed Matt Cutts about it, and one realty forum is going nuts about it, with a 132 posts.

I wish I could post the links so that folks here could evaluate what's being said.

Has anyone else heard of this?

[martinibuster]

Real estate sites have a reputation for heavy interlinking between related sites. It wouldn't surprise me if this has something to do with it.

[potentialgeek]

This has been a long time in the making.

When Mr. Cutts talks like he's going to do something, but hasn't got around to it, you have to think ahead. Google is often slow to enforce its standards, but very severe when it finally does.

p/g

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:20 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

P/G, I think it's unreliable when someone says they "heard something" from someone without saying where or when it was allegedly said. That's a shaky citation.

The interesting thing about the blogger you mentioned is that when you do a Yahoo backlink search on the URL they posted, the very first result is using the same template as his Real Estate site and is in fact under his control.

As I posted above, Real Estate sites are notorious for interlinking between sites they control or between sites under the control of their so-called SEOs. That blogger is typical of the type. Disregard him and his blog, he's deluded and guilty as charged.