No matter what, I do not want to use black hat tactics --- its not worth the risk. However, all of my top competitors --- are using Black Hat SEO and they're @ the top of Google. Take the search term "Boston Real Estate" for instance... Everyone on the top 10, besides Boston.com & Trulia are involved in Link Exchange Schemes Take www,bushari,com for instance --- this company has around 50 pages dedicated to reciprocal link exchanges to other real estate agencies all across the world. Also, www,bushari,com has other websites such as bostonianlofts,com & cambridgeluxuryliving,com -- which all interlink to eachother. Any idea what I should do? I plan on just building 1-way directory links, 1-way blog links, 1-way Press Release links, and hopefully find some "authority" sites to link to me................................... And wait for Google to get rid of these people................... however, is Google ever going to penalize them?? They must notice they have 10000's of links exchanges with real estate agencies all across the world.
My domain is about 2 yrs old.... and my competitors are around the same The thing is, I keep reading reciprocal link exchanges are Black Hat... however, the people @ the top of Google for my keywords, are all reciprocal link-exchange artists Im reluctant to joing the reciprocal link exchange group..... Im thinking I should just build 1 way links.... What do you guys think about this???
I don't think so. I do think that recip linking has very little value but not blackhat. Think of the web the way it is intended to be "LINKS". It's about links that make sense and are within the same themed category. Of course there is on-page and off-page that you need to consider but don't get hung up on either one too much. Try to zoom right out. Now that you can see your site from a bird's eye view, what are you trying to accomplish? Answer that question and make an off and on-page plan that fits your goals. Rumor has it, Google still bases its ranking 60% (on-page) - 40% (off-page) H
Hey, Black hat is not the only way to rank the website & in fact we all should not go for black hat techniques...otherwise it will cost us more in future.. Reciprocal linking is not a black hat technique (yea, it has less value though). You are talking only about link building..are you focusing on other SEO factors as well which are very important to get good ranking. There are many on-page, off page & on-site factors which are responsible for rankings in Google. I am working (SEO & PPC) on 2 real estate website..we are not using any black hat tech & getting good rank from our ethical SEO techniques only. You can also improve your site rank by focusing on all Grey areas not just the link building.
Real Estate is a very competitive area. If you consider link trading and link buying black hat I think you are actually correct in saying you won't rank without using them. For such a competitive market I would be very surprised if you could get a top 10 spot without trading/buying any links. Use the link:www.competitorswebsite command in yahoo to see who is linking to them, that will give you a better idea of what you need to do to beat them. Trading links is not blackhat so don't worry about it. Neither are many link building techniques
Besides link building.... what really else is there.... Title Tag seems to be important..... age of domain name seems to be important... meta tags seem not to be worth anything..... domain name seems to be important... and having keywords on the page, and a large site with good content updated frequently seems to be the rest....... am I missing anything else? And reciprocal linking schemes.... I thought you could get penalized for --- but I dont see it happening to my competitors ----- the only thing I can see is, it does happen in the future to them
I would say this to you, stay clean with white hat seo. They might be on top now by using black hat SEO but they will get degraded by google sooner or later so just wait a bit and you will see a huge difference in serps.
Ask bloggers to review your site and to put a link with your keywords. If you gain 10 links you will feel an increase of your SERP.
How could reciprocal link/link exchange be defined as "Black hat"? That is not a black hat at all. They just do link exchange among themselves in relevancy sites. However, link exchange has been devalued since many peoples abuse them, but still, it's not a black hat. Black hat mean some trickery for Googlebot such as cloaking page, 302 spam redirect, content scraper, etc. If you want to be on top - spend some budget built up trust on your empire by get your site reviewed on authoritative directory such as joeant.com, business.com, gimpsy.com and yahoo directory and more. Plus you may need to spend on many niche directory in real estate. Press release link won't help you much since that is a temporarily thing and blog link won't help you much either if it come from a blog network.
I would say you are obviously not doing it as effectively as they are. To rank better one of the most important thing is getting link from RELATED sites. You can use link exchange, and that should be from RELATED sites. There are tons of other methods as well to rank better in search engines e.g. articles etc.
I do not think it has too much related to "Black hat" either. Top 10 pages are very competitive especially for all high PR avg. Ezer tool shows top 10 PR/SERPs ratio summary avg PR>5 as expensive keywords like : ( Boston+Real+Estate ) Count PR PR0 PR1 PR2 PR3 PR4 PR5 PR6 PR7 PR8 PR9 PR10 Total Avg Top 10 Google SERPs 0 0 0 1 4 1 1 2 1 0 0 52/10 5.20 Count PR PR0 PR1 PR2 PR3 PR4 PR5 PR6 PR7 PR8 PR9 PR10 Total Avg Top 20 Google SERPs 0 0 0 4 8 3 2 2 1 0 0 93/20 4.65 Count PR PR0 PR1 PR2 PR3 PR4 PR5 PR6 PR7 PR8 PR9 PR10 Total Avg Top 30 Google SERPs 0 0 2 5 12 4 4 2 1 0 0 133/30 4.43 Count PR PR0 PR1 PR2 PR3 PR4 PR5 PR6 PR7 PR8 PR9 PR10 Total Avg Top 40 Google SERPs 2 0 2 6 17 5 5 2 1 0 0 167/40 4.18
Hello as most of guys has mentioned, reals estate is very competitive. the best way to beat them with little money is to be more specified for your keywords, something like : new york real estate, boston real state. that will reduce the number of competitors, Unless you have a nation wide agency Good luck