Link Exchanges - Safe or Dangerous?

There are confusing messages out there about link exchanges. It seems that in the past, some real estate websites at Advanced Access and REW have been severely penalized by Google for "excessive" link exchanges. On the other hand, since that penalty, many of the real estate agent websites that are at the top of Google's results are those that still participate in national real estate directory style link exchanges.

To add insult to injury, when the #1 website for "mycity real estate" is not using link exchanges, then it is frequently because the top site is one of the national websites like Trulia or Yahoo Real Estate that inherently have less need for link exchanges to compete for rankings because they do SEO savvy/self-serving things like nofollowing links to other real estate agents websites and  buying links from high pagerank sites in the name of advertising. They are also big enough to hire a PR Firm to get them editorial content from newspapers.

So what's a local agent supposed to do to compete in this scenario? I honestly don't know the answer, but after exploring dozens of other agents sites, one of the best ideas that I've seen is to do local and regional link exchanges because those are arguably much more relevant to our target audiences and thus presumably safer from Google's wrath. However, I haven't personally implemented this yet, but I think that this is one road I'm going to go down.

The other idea that I will also be trying soon is to setup a blog on my website that discusses both local and national real estate issues. I've noticed that many agents have blogs, but they are very locally focused, which is great, but it doesn't create a lot of opportunity to build creative relationships with agents from out of the area, and I think that building such relationships is one of the secrets to building the strength of your link network. For example, once a blog is sufficiently established, then you can invite other agents to do guest posts on your blog and you may also get invitations to do such on their blogs.

What's your take?

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