How to Handle a Google Penalty - And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate

Last week, I interviewed the head of Google's spam team, Matt Cutts, about a lot of different issues. One of the most intriguing to webmasters appears to have been the discussion in the 2nd video (around 6:00) where we go into a chat about the real estate industry online, where thousands of websites have recently lost rankings due to participation in egregious manipulation through reciprocal link campaigns.

During the chat, I referred to this thread at RealEstateWebmasters (14 pages and 132 replies) discussing the "shot across the bow" that Matt's team fired in mid-May. Obviously, that site has long recommended link exchanges as a way to get ranks, and honestly, it's hard to find fault with their advice since until just recently, the tactics were very effective. Here's how it usually works in the real estate website world:

• A new realtor launches her site and finds that Google traffic is the best thing since sliced bread
• Naturally, wanting more, she starts reading online about how to get Google rankings to real estate websites
• Many of the popular forums & guides suggest forming relationships with other site owners in the real estate world and trading links
• Our realtor takes the hint - she works in Bend, Oregon, so she contacts site owners from Poughkeepsie to Puyallup seeking link exchanges
• Each site places a link to the other on a "links" page (a good example would be this one from a Missouri real estate agent)
• Our realtor gets a bit in rankings from the link love and she's thrilled
• Matt comes in and ruins her day :)

Seriously, though, what's taking place is clearly in violation of Google's guidelines (the old ones and the new ones). Google has no interest in ranking a site higher because they've traded links with realtors around the country anonymously and primarily for the purpose of rankings. Now, granted, there is a tough line to draw here because there may, in fact, be realtors who do have some relationships in other cities or states and genuinely want to endorse one another's services. In the SEO world, this happens naturally all the time - I might meet an SEO from Delaware and link to them because of their great services and they, in kind, might link to SEOmoz, recommending our work in Seattle. That's pretty kosher, and Matt & Co. probably do want to respect those links.

The problem is - how do they tell the two apart?

One method might be sheer volume. It's not a huge deal to link to 5, 10 or maybe even 20 of your friends from the industry. But, push that to 50, 100 or more and things start looking pretty suspicious. If you're linking out to 10 dozen sites and they all link back to you and all of these outbound links appear on one page (particularly when that pages is named links.html - 38,000 results or links.htm - 26,000 results), Matt's spam busters are going to get mighty suspicious.

Here's the reason I feel empathy for these webmasters - many of them are just small business owners who want to get some leads on the Internet. They've probably never read Google's guidelines or even thought about the "algorithm" or a "spam team." By and large, they know about selling houses in good neighborhoods and covering up the flaws in a fixer-upper. They went online, got themselves a website, stumbled across the first way to market it they found and listened to the general consensus of advice. It's tough to blame them the same way you might blame a site that's trying to rank for "buy viagra" use link injections and cloaking.

So, on to the meat of the post... What should these thousands of real estate webmasters do? And, what should you do if you find yourself similarly penalized. Well, luckily I've made one of my patented, late-night flowcharts:
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This flowchart isn't going to solve all your problems, but it's definitely a good starting point. And perhaps, if Matt swings by (or the next time I interview him), we can chat a bit more about whether this system fits with what he'd recommend.

Just to help out, I'm going to walk through a quick example from someone in the RealEstateWebmasters.com forum's thread:

• We'll start with Hgrealtor's site - www.oaklandhomespecialist.com
• The site's still indexed - it has 94 pages in Google
• It ranks #1 on a search for the brand name - oaklandhomespecialist - that tells me we're not dealing with a "sandbox"-like effect
• It's ranking #67 on a search of the home page's full title tag - Oakland Real Estate | Oakland California Homes for Sale | Realtor - that's definitely a bad sign
• On the plus side, they rank #7 for - crocker highlands homes - so they're not as badly buried as others I've seen
• And, they're #3 for temescal homes
• This leads me to believe that while they might have had some of their links de-valued, the site isn't in grave danger, or even necessarily in need of a re-inclusion request

OK, while I'd love to dive into even more detail, it's 2:10am and I need to be up at 5:45am to catch a plane to Toronto for SES. I really need a better schedule...

UPDATE: A gentleman from Cedar City Real Estate noted, wisely, that my analysis of OaklandHomesSpecialist.com may not be entirely correct - many times a site can be penalized or sandboxed and still rank for very particular branded terms (like the domain name itself). My apologies on the goof!