Spam, Link Exchanges, and Other Real Estate SEO Failures

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Today, I received what must have been the 50th spam email from some company claiming to be a real estate SEO firm. Evidently, they rely heavily on link exchanges for their SEO clients, because all of the spam emails I've received from them have been the garden-variety link swap messages -- the kind of email that begins with the always awful phrase "Dear Webmaster."

Let me make offer some advice, based on nearly eight years of search engine optimization experience. If you pay money to a company that relies on this kind of tactic as the core of their real estate SEO program, you are missing the whole point of search engine optimization. You're putting your money in the wrong place at the same time.

Let me start with the "premise" of this blog post, and then I'll explain it in more detail:

If you rely on link exchanges to build your link popularity, your website will never live up to its full ranking potential.

High-ranking, quality websites (the kind you want to get links from) do not participate in link exchange programs, because such programs are the tools of the desperate. So when you spend all of your time and money on link exchanges, you are building up a link profile that puts you in a certain "neighborhood." Swapping links is a technique used by webmasters with inferior websites (and the lazy SEO companies that act on their behalf). Instead of building a quality website that naturally attracts links, the lazy webmaster tries to "game the system" by getting links through exchanges.

It's like saying: "Look, my website is not good enough to attract unsolicited links. And neither is yours. So let's commiserate by linking to each other."

One of my mortgage websites is fairly high ranking. It competes with LendingTree and the like for most mortgage-related key phrases. But I didn't achieve this by being lazy, or by wasting my time with link exchange programs. I achieved it by spending many hours, over many years, to develop a truly useful and unique website. As a result, other webmasters link to it without me asking them to.

This is the only way to get links from reputable, high-ranking websites. Why? Because such websites ignore link-exchange requests, for the same reasons I ignore them. When you rely too heavily on a link-exchange program for too long, you'll end up being "stuck," in terms of your search engine rankings. You will never be able to compete with the webmasters who know the "secret" to link building. And the secret is what I've just explained. Long-term SEO success comes from building a quality website with great content -- the kind of website that attracts links naturally.

Or, you can go the lazy route and hire a real estate SEO company to put you in a link-exchange program. They'll make huge promises, but they won't be able to deliver because you cannot earn top rankings for highly competitive phrases through link swapping. They'll say things like, "Well, we use a three-way triangle link swap, so the search engines can't tell they are reciprocal links." But this technique still misses the point. It ignores the fundamentals of SEO success that I've explained above, and it will forever keep you in league with other desperate webmasters. Good luck breaking out of that pool to reach the top of the search engines!

Professional Internet publishers (the people you want to get links from) ignore link-exchange emails. Why? Because they get tons of these requests, and just like me they are tired of them. I've gone so far as creating email filters to block all emails with the word "exchange" in the subject line, though some of them still get through. A link-exchange email request will only get the attention of mediocre websites, so it will result in a mediocre link profile.

When Google's ranking algorithm evaluates your website, it will check to see what kind of links your site has coming in. Does it get links from educational websites, journalistic websites, and high-ranking authority sites? If so, you'll be rewarded with good rankings.

Or does the site only have links from less-popular websites with little or no traffic of their own (the kind of webmasters who also rely on link-exchange programs)? If this is the case, Google's algorithm will put a lot of other websites above yours. Goodbye top rankings!

There's no reason to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to a real estate SEO company that is going to trap you into mediocre rankings. The best person to manage your SEO campaign is you -- and I've given you the tools for success already.

Here's another reason you should be concerned with the quality of your website. Search engines are beginning to consider usage data when ranking websites. And they should, because this kind of data suggests how useful a website truly is -- so it should definitely be a ranking factor. I blogged about this back in 2007, and it has become even more important since then.

Here's what it boils down to. If the majority of people who land on your website (from a search engine) leave the site right away, then it will hurt your rankings. On the contrary, if most of your visitors stay on your website for a while, it will help your rankings. Search engines use web browser "cookies" to track people who use their sites. If somebody clicks on a link through a Google search engine result, Google can track their browser activity until they end their Internet session or clear out their cookie cache. They do this, partly, to gauge the true popularity and usefulness of the website. And they adjust the site's ranking accordingly. This is as it should be.

How do you get people to stay on your site? You create quality content. You make your website easy to navigate. You offer useful tools that help people accomplish a certain goal. You make your website unique and better than the websites of your competitors. You let people interact with the site in some way (chat, FAQ programs, blog comments, etc.).

I'll get off my soapbox now. I hope I've made my point, for what it's worth.