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Sounds good Tom.

Hey Greg, any resolution on this?

Hi Lee, any update on the status of this? Did you ever hear back from Google?

Here is my question - why are you thinking about doing this instead of building genuine linkable assets and building your brand online? This is SO easy to do for real estate, you just have to think a bit outside the box.

I wrote a post on ContentMarketingInstitute.com today about the types of content that real estate agents should create. Have a read - http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/07/4-types-of-content-for-realtors/

You should be looking to build genuine assets like this that is the kind of thing that Google wants to reward as opposed to trying to game the system, which at best will give you a short yet unsustainable boost, and at worst will penalize you. Why take the chance?

Just one more, you have some weird internal duplication going on too. The following URLs are indexed but render the homepage:

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=CAR%20HAULER&year=1999&make=Ford&model=F-350%20SD&trim=XLT%20Crew%20Cab%20DRW%204WD

http://www.ohioautowarehouse.com/contactus.php?stock=q2311&year=2004&make=Cadillac&model=Escalade&trim=AWD

I bet there are more of these too. Maybe these pages are supposed to 404/redirect and instead are mirroring the homepage? That could be causing the issue.

If the links are exact anchors (which I assume they are if you were doing link exchanges) and are in the footer, I would get them removed. I have not heard of anyone linkbuilding their way out of Penguin; only by removing bad links have people recovere. So yes, I would remove these links if they are this way.

Branded links are usually fine, unless they are something like what WPMU dealt with and they were too close to exact anchors.

Penguin seems to mean that there are specific links that Google does not like. Go look at the posts that have been written for the different types they don't like, and look through your backlink profile to find the money terms where you might have too many exact anchors.

Good luck.

This is a great question, and from some posts I've seen it seems that plugins like SEO Smart Links have caused issues with Penguin: http://www.itechcode.com/2012/05/19/vital-seo-tips-after-penguin-algorithm-update/

So I would say yes. Be careful using things like SEO Smart Links or KB Linker, as they can cause you to unnaturally link certain words all the time, in a way that is not good for user experience either.

It's harder when you are talking navigation, etc, but I posit (and I have no proof of this) that menus and such are not as at-risk to be hit with Penguin as overdone in context links.

As we always say, what would users expect to see? Give them that.

Hope this helps