There’s a string over at Real Town on the home page in RealTown’s Real Estate Community titled RE: reciprocal links with other agents …. banned i about whether or not Real Estate Agents should be linking to each other.

Some folks there have advocated it’s fine to do it, but if you watch Part II of the two interviews here [at approx. the midway point] with Google’s own Matt Cutts, Chief Page Rank Engineer, he suggests they don’t like, for instance, for a Realtor in Maine to link to Realtors in CA. He suggests, rewarding this kind of linking doesn’t lend itself to a good Google search experience….

We don’t ever claim to know exactly what Google can, cannot or will do because that would be irresponsible, but when the message comes direct from the source, we take notice. If there’s any chance at all that something like this can get you in trouble… why play Roulette? Just look at the Google Webmaster Guidelines where it says, “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Still skeptical? Read this gentleman’s story, “My website was recently penalized in Google for what I believe to be excessive cross linking…”

It’s good to keep in mind that Google’s techniques for ranking content are ever- changing. It’s only logical they must constantly tweak & tinker because they have a significant business at stake and it depends on giving all searchers the best search experience they can. In summary, use your Blog and your website to give the Search Engines consistently good on- topic information with relevant links that would help your audience and you should fare well.