It seems like that is what we’re dealing with now. Someone walks up to Matt, shmoozes with him and next thing we know that person decides what Google should do.
On Real Estate Webmasters a thread got started called
Was Greg Boser responsible for REW penalties? .
Here is the OP:

The web guerillas first post on REW was in July of 2006. Then he had no posts until April 27th, 2007. Which was about 12 days after many Advanced Access sites were penalized by Google. Then he made a few posts until his last one on May 19th, 10 days after many REW sites get hit with a penalty. He has not posted since then.

Ryan Ward has Google analytics showing the following visitors to his website:

April 17th and 18th - I was visited by Greg Boser. Do you think he said something to Google? Because….

April 20th - Google AND Greg Boser aka, webguerilla, llc paid a visit.

April 24th - Google came back again.

April 30th and May 1st - Advanced Access - Who do you think told them?

May 3rd - Google one more time and my state pages had been removed by then.

May 9th (Day of Penalty) - Greg Boser, coincidence?

May 11th - Greg Boser - Maybe checking to make sure?

I personally didn’t pay that much attention to it until Greg Boser posted here saying:

Pretty impressive detective work Marc. I have never denied the fact that during my time as a consultant for AA that I gave both Yahoo and Google examples of other companies engaging in the same kind of behavior that got AA penalized. It’s part of the job when you are doing reinclusion work. You clean up your mess, say your sorry, and promise not to do it again. You also respectfully ask them to apply the same standards to everyone in the space. That doesn’t always happen, but you always ask. Doing anything less than that would be the equivalent of SEO malpractice.

To take that and say I’m somehow responsible for you getting banned I think is making some attempt to imply that I have some type of ability to convince Google to take action against sites that aren’t actually violating their guidelines. And that’s about the most rediculous thing I’ve ever heard.

There have been people on this and other forums trying to explain to those who would listen that no search engine feels that all reciprocal linking in the real estate space was acceptable long before I ever posted here. That being the case, the only one you have to blame is yourself.

What we’re dealing with here is someone being allowed to sabotage organic web results to get rid of the competition.
We all know that Greg didn’t do this out of the goodness of his heart.
We all know that Matt enjoys spending time with people like him, but still claiming that the same values Google once had still apply, is now false.
on Matt’s
How to report paid links
post he talks about finding better ways to discount paid links and links in general which are generated artificially. But somehow he has now decided to give penalties of 30-60 days to real estate websites with “state pages”.

respectfully ask them to apply the same standards to everyone

I’m not a fan of link exchange myself, at least not unless it makes sense.
Many websites out there are included in the SERPs which have high rankings. Including a site which Matt himself has used as an example for what not to do.
So why do real estate webmasters get penalized?
Only Greg knows. And Matt.

Mike Dammann

P.S.: Ongoing dicussions: Property Hogs Forum - Know Denver Web Guy

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