While all the other rental sites that I track had amazing growth in Jan 2010, Rentedspaces.com took a giant hit in traffic.

Not sure why yet, perhaps it was from organic traffic or perhaps they reduced their AdWords spending. But wow what a nose dive when everyone else had big growth!

For me this is kind of fun to see because the main reason they got so much traffic was because of all the AOL properties linking to it. Perhaps Google has finally cracked down on this a bit.

Update: Not that I believe KeywordSpy.com that much, but it claims that RentedSpaces spends $83,000 a day on ads. To put that number in perspective, it claims that Rentals.com spends about $3,000 a day. Perhaps they decided to cut that off in January even though the chart below indicates otherwise.

This graph says it all. Oh, I wish I had the power of AOL’s network behind my site!

From Compete.com, showing traffic stats.

RentedSpaces.com has really busted on to the rental scene in the past 4 months because they are owned by AOL and get a ton of backlinks from all their properties.

But what is odd is it appears that RentedSpaces.com (AOL) is buying links from Forbes.com which is a no-no in Google’s eyes.

Looks like they are going after the anchor text “apartments”.

I am looking at my competitors backlinks today and I gotta say I am not happy with a few of them because they are clearly buying links. I don’t buy links so somehow I wish I could level the playing field somehow. I am only naming names with RentedSpaces.com because they should know better but some of these smaller sites need to clean up their act.