So as Advanced Access is trying hard to fix an issue quickly that has been created by years to attempts to manipulate the system we should ask what can be learned from this? How can we take what has happened at AA and learn from it to prevent similar issues from happening to your sites (for those of you that don’t have an AA site at least)?

Be warned that Yahoo is looking at cross linking of networks, they can and will penalize by IP address, and they have raised issue with “spammy anchor text” (or keyword stuffed anchor text).

Cross linking of networks is an issue of sites on the same IP address linking to one another per the response that AA got from Yahoo. As most sites are on shared IP addresses this effects most sites. You will want to consider not linking with other sites on the same network.

As the actions of others on your network can effect you, think about the practices of others you share an IP address with. Their actions might call attention to your IP address and then if enough sites are doing the same thing a blanket penalty could be enacted as was done to AA. Please note that even sites that have done little or no cross linking with other AA sites did get penalized.

The anchor text issue is one that is hard for me. I personally like descriptive links and would use them even if the search engines didn’t exist. They make sense to me, but I don’t care enough to risk my search engine rankings over it. Consider some options to the typical “city state real estate” anchor text, how about “agent name, city” and have the links organized by state. You will get the benefit of the pages content being about the state, you get your city, and the site is about real estate so that will also benefit you. Plus a your description can have a few keywords in it also that will help. Is it as good as “city state real estate”? Maybe not, then again maybe it’s even better if the search engines are truly looking for ways to weed out the abuse of excessive linking, which most experts would agree they are trying to do.

Wish there was an easy answer to AA’s problem, but then it wouldn’t be any fun. Think about how this might effect you down the road and consider the risk and reward to your linking strategy. There can’t be an all or none with things like this in my opinion, you need a balanced approach.

A final thought. To my knowledge these issues are only with Yahoo and with large networks as of today. The issue is will this filter down to smaller networks and worse will Google ever take actions like these?