Google penalises real estate recripocal links

In April this year, many real estate agents across America found their Google rankings had suddenly slipped causing an outcry on SEO forums across the internet. The main cause of the furore was Google's decision to manually punish estate agents using a web design and hosting company called Advanced Access.

The company has over 30,000 real estate agents on its books and as part of the "benefit" of using their services, agents receive reciprocal links from other companies on their network.As we explained in our Introduction to Link Building, Google only wants to count "editorial citations" when passing authority. From Google's point of view, the fact that 30,000 agents were using the same company for their web hosting gave them an unfair advantage over their competitors, so Matt Cutts manually went in and scrubbed the value of these links.Google did not do this algorithmically, so all reciprocal links are not worthless (although they have been significantly devalued recently), but it demonstrates their intentions.