Tonight I receive an "Unsolicited" email from a company wanting me to put my profile and photo on their site, http: //www .azrealestateexperts .com, for one-time fee of $45 that is good for one year. Among other things they state that they are ranked on the first page of Google for more than thirty (30) keywords including; arizona real estate, arizona real estate agents, etc. Of course I have the Google toolbar installed and instantly noticed that their site had no Pagerank, Cache, or Backlinks. So I went to Google and pulled up many of the keywords they say they are number one for and couldn't find their site at all. So then I performed a WHOIS lookup and noticed the domain was only first registered on 11-12-04. In your opinion, what would you do? Would you report them? If so, where? Would you turn a cheek? If so, why?
If you still have the e-mail and it dose not have all the information that is now required by law, do report them.
Contact their hosting company and your ISP and report them for spam. Also you know most real estate agents fall for junk like this because they dont know any better. Good thing people like you and I are her to warn them. Since we are on the subject there is another company that is scamming real estate agents keywordranking dot com. This company should be shut down by the FTC. I have reported them several times. Realtor beware of misleading promises. Always check before you purchase.
I have to be honest that I do not link to real estate sites - I know I'm probably loosing out on some good BL's, because there are many good optimised sites, but I've heard so many scams about people getting booted from Google because of sites they have linked to in the RE industry.
As I have stated before real estate seo has become as BAD as the porn industry use to be. Its hard to combat these types of websites. I dont do as many recip links anymore and if I do I check out the website before I agree to it to make sure I am not linking to a bad neighbor.