So I caused a little bit of a stir in a few forums with my last post. In a private forum to AA site owners only Terry, the creator of RealEstateABC and the owner of HomeSurfer.com, posted this:

I just had a parrallel discussion to this on another forum.

My point was only that if agents did NOT link to directory or authority sites that had proved their “good” intentions, then the real estate world would be run by Realtor.com, Barry Diller, Warren Buffet and smilar folks (only I used different words).

My response was this:

Terry your point is well taken. Would like your input on this as you are one of the good guys that we want to keep at the top, actually we now need to get homesurfer to the top don’t we.

IMO There isn’t a all or none on this topic, for to long agents have been linking to any directory to get links back. To many agents heard that they needed links from directories and didn’t understand that not all directories are equal. Many of these directories are just a FFA site and adsense or HG affilate income is the only purpose of the site, not traffic to the agent.

As links are removed to the low quality directories or those that try to drive traffic to lead generators the power of these sites will become less. As an added bonus all of your other links pointing to quality sites will have more power/weight so you will be helping the quality sites even more (this is based on the idea that PR passed is divided among all links on a page).

Directory owners do need some of us to pay for links as there has to be a profit in it for them. Most agents will be to cheap to pay for something they can get for free and that’s fine, but lets at least inform others so they aren’t linking to directories that aren’t going to help them. Keep the links pointing to sites that have proven their good intentions.

And lastly, an agents homepage needs to be presented in certain way and I don’t feel 20 banners cluttering it up is the correct impression we should be making. A couple links to true high quality directories isn’t bad, but seriously look at the average agents HP that plays around with their own SEO (ie 10, 20, or more banners) and tell me that it sends the right message to visitors/potential clients.

I realize that many may have taken my first post to mean that linking to any directory is bad. This isn’t true as there are some directories that actually have been designed to drive traffic and give quality links to agents. Linking to a resource like this in no way will hurt your site.

I hope this helps clarify my position a little bit. There will be a continued effort to share opinions about the quality of as many real estate directories as I can.