Exessive Recip Penalty Spreading?

[DenverGuy]

Google has penalized quite a few Advanced Access sites including mine for what apprears to be "excessive reciprocal linking". I have heard it sometimes called "link spam". My site was "cleaned-up" before the penalty was imposed but it got hit anyway.

There was a post in the AA Forums this morning that several "major market" sites on the Real Estate Webmasters platform have been hit with the same penalty. I also heard that a few sites from other platforms have began to be penalized in the same way.

Does anyone know for sure?

In my market, the number 1 site in Google is REW and it is down at least for the moment. It is sitting 2 spots above me on page 6 for "Denver Real Estate". So, it could be the same penalty.

[Jersey Girl]

i know for sure the company i mentioned previously was hit a few weeks ago.

[DenverGuy]

Jay Griffin just mentioned Denver, Las Vegas, Destin, and Chicago in the AA Forum for REW sites that have dropped.

[Max]

I haven't seen Drew Hartanov ranking with his GuideToLocalRealEstate either... I'm not sure if ever was ranking high though.

[DenverGuy]

The Webmaster at REW has confirmed at their forum that several of their sites have slipped in the last day. He says no one knows for sure exactly why.

[knoll]

I don't get it either.

My site got hit (down to #50) and another AA site that has a boat load more linking than me is still at #3.

Not fair!!

[Phoenix]

I hear ya Kristin. There is an AA site sitting at #1 for Phoenix Real Estate in Google that has been there as long as I can remember. She is using a triangular linking strategy that most likely will never be caught by Google. She gets links in to her home page, then links out from a third level domain "links.hersite.com" which isn't even hosted on the same server or IP address as her main site.

Can't believe what some people can get away with. Makes me think she pretty, cause her site sure isn't. LOL

[DenverGuy]

As of this morning, this is still the number one listing for "Phoenix Real Estate" in Google. It's a pretty obvious example of the link spam for which I have been manually penalized.

Phoenix Az Real Estate - Real Estate Phoenix Az - Phoenix Homes ...Real estate listings of homes for sale in Phoenix. Specializes in working with buyers.
www.phxrealestate.com/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

About - www.phxrealestate.com/Nav.aspx/Page=/About/Default.aspx
Phoenix Hotels - www.phxrealestate.com/Nav.aspx/Page=/AreaLinks/Default.aspx
Oregon Links - links.phxrealestate.com/links31.html
Link Partners - links.phxrealestate.com/
More results from www.phxrealestate.com »

As far as I know, its been over a week since the last batch of sites got manually penalized. It appears that less than 200 sites have been penalized so far since April 15. That's slow going.

If Google is manually "trying to clean up the real estate space", as has been alleged, you would think they would use an army of workers.

Instead they appear to be using an army of one.

[Karen]

I've seen that Phoenix site and it isn't pretty. Wondering if anyone has considered submitting the site to G as an example of spam and poor website design?

[Max]

Google doesn't care about the design as long as there is no intention to manipulate search results. As far as spam - the only thing for sure I know is that the sitelinks in the results that appear below the result are not relevant to the search - I quoted google in my blog post