Inportant information about LeapFish.com

Via Bart Wilson (Voyager International):

As I was just getting to enjoy my coffee (perfect temperature) my cell phone rings. 

It's a sales call from a fast talking telemarketer from LeapFish.com

"I found you on ActiveRain," he says "...and I wanted to let you know that you can own keywords for your area."

I ask him, What keywords and since 92% of my traffic already comes from Google and I am already page one #1 and page one #2, how can I get any better than this?

He explains, "Because you get to own the key words and we're the biggest out there. We've combined Yahoo, Google, MSN...blah blah blah blah"

The rest became white noise for me.

I tell him I am going to LeapFish.com and I enter in the key words, virtual tour camera,  360 virtual tours, and broker agent software.

I'm already on page one on your site now.  I ask the pushy fast talker, HOW CAN I GET ANY BETTER?  (This guy is starting to irritate me now)

He says, "Because you get to own the keywords, you pay once..." I cut him off. I say thanks but is it too much to ask that you guys at least QUALFIFY your prospect before you call them?  Geez, man it saves a lot of embarrassment here. 

So we hang up.

But here's my concern for my fellow Active Rainer's.

They are snooping Active Rain for prospects.  So here's my concern for all of you who right now DO NOT have a natural first page presence on Google.

Stay away from these guys. It's clear to me they are only patrolling the Active Rain portal to scoop up leads and if they call you, it might sound impressive. But you have to understand the importance of PLANNING THE SALES CALL.

Since they didn't bother pre-screening me for any top page rank key words, this means this firm practices the classic READY, FIRE, AIM which simply means this firm is not looking after your best interest.

They only want your money and a slick voice will tell you lots of interesting things -- but if they are not doing any research on you or your domain name before they call -- this simply smacks of unprofessionalism and greed to me. 

But for me, this firm is no better than MerchantCircle.com and ePerks a similar firm went bankrupt and it looks like funds from that firm have gone to start up LeapFish.com.  But I have not done a lot of research on this yet. You can read more about ePerks and LeapFish here. 

 

 

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 03/13/2009 09:55 PM   Comments (0)  

Many of my reders at Go Beyond MLS are aware that I am the autor of Top 100 Real Estate Blogs- a website that uses data from Google, Alexa and Technorati to rank the real estate blogs. The list have recieved equal amouont of support and criticism on my blog when I announced the list. It even caught attention of well respected ActiveRain blogger.

When creating such a list I though I will contribute in unique way to real estate blogging community. Although Bloglfux and other similar services have "real estate" category, often these websites require adding a piece of HTML code to the blog. I wanted to be able to rank a group of logs without having the owners to add any code to their website. So the list of top 100 real estate blogs was born:

Top 100 Real Estate Blogs

The list (and website it was hosted at) was just recently moved to a new web host and received small face lift. The data is update more frequently and now there is blog as well.

Although there are more 100 blogs on the list- new blogs are still welcomed.

Knowing that ActiveRain members are very responsive and engaged bunch of bloggers so I would like to see yet another round of feedback. Feel free to let me know what do you think about the list- good and bad. I will do my best to answer any questions or concerns raised in the comments.

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 09/27/2008 05:05 PM   Comments (4)   Blogging in the Online Marketing Channel   blogging  

If you have tried to run a Pay Per Click campaign on Google Adwords, chances are you may have been faced with a phenomena of price per click hitting as high as $10 per click. Generally this effect to what Google calls “low quality score”. It has to do with your ad being relevant to the landing page- and I would suggest not to bid on a keyword that is not found on your landing page. But it also has to do with the click through rates. One of the way to attract more clicks to your ad is when your add includes the keyword you are bidding for. Now I know what you are asking. How can this be accomplished for a campaign with hundreds of keywords. And no you do not have to create a separate ad copy for every single keyword in your campaign. You simply can use dynamic keyword insertion when creating your add copy in your Google AdWords account.

The dynamic keyword insertion is accomplished by the following syntax {keyword: key word}. The end result of this method is that the keywords you are bid on are automatically included into the copy of your add. These keywords are displayed in bold to the Internet users and generally increase the click through rate of your add.

Few few quick points.

{keyword:key word} will render your key word in small letters.

{KeyWord: key word} will render your firs letters in your keywords in capitals.

I know that if you are new to pay per click advertising the above may not make much sense. So here is an example how to do it. I will use ActiveRain's domain as an example in creating an add that will use dynamic keyword insertion:

Dynamic Keywords Insertion on Google Adwords

 

I hope the above examples makes it easy to understand how to implement the dynamic keyword insertion.

I know it can be very disheartening to see your cost per click spike. When it happened to me, I literally abandoned pay per click advertising for about three months. If you have an abandoned campaign sitting out there there might be a good chance for recovering and making it perform well again.

 

 

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 09/04/2008 02:43 PM   Comments (15)   pay per click, google adwords  

Just the other day I have written a post about importance of implementing ALT tag on your images. Today I would like to show you have you add extra flare to your images with title tags. While the ALT tag can help you greatly in your SEO efforts, the title tag adds some extra elegance to your images, and some times can even help to reinforce message that a particular image is meant to convey.

So what does title tag do? If implemented, the title tag ads an extra text which "pops up" when a visitor hovers with their mouse over the image. Here is an example. The image below has this title tag implemented and if you hover with your mouse over the image a small pop up will appear with the text "Beautiful African Violet":

African Violet

Here on ActiveRain when uploading the image and filling out the information about your image the image description becomes ALT tag in the HTML code, while the title becomes TITLE tag in the HTML code.

How can you use this info? Well today we use hundreds of images on our websites. Pictures of homes, graphics for our websites, subscription buttons.

Let say you have a subscription button somewhere on your blog. If you decide to reinforce the "message" you subscription button is sending, try to assign following value to the tile tag of your subscription button: "Subscribe Now!"

Knowing this trick you of course limited only by your imagination in what you can do with the title tag of your images.

It is also important to note that title tag attribute is not exclusive to images. You can use this attribute just about on any part of your website. I like to use it often on links, and of course most of my links have a "Click here" reinforcemnet.

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/31/2008 12:52 PM   Comments (13)  

Abundance of comments on a blog usually indicates that blog contains outstanding content and has vibrant community of readers. In many ways I am surprised how responsive ActiveRainers are when they find useful information or an intriguing post here on ActiveRain. Even a newbie like myself can receive 10+ comments. This of course is very encouraging. So much so I am contemplating to abandon blogging on one of my other blogs and instead begin writing on ActiveRain more frequently.

If you are one of those bloggers that enjoys comments on your posts, and maybe are trying to respond to every comment (if possible) you may wish, as I do, that we had a "threaded comment system" so you can respond to a prticular comment and you response will "nest" right under the comment you are responding to.

It may not be such a big problem when the number of comments is low. However I read many blogs on ActiveRain that on occasion recieve 50+ comments. If I were the author of such posts, I would love to acknowledge these comments or simply participate in the ongoing discussion. The current system on ActiveRain can be likened to walking up on a stairway while trying to keep conversation with some one 10 people ahead of you.

I often use "@UserName" trick to respond to a particular comment. However it would be so much easier if ActiveRain would implement the threaded comments, or use comment management system like Disqus that have this threaded comments feature by default:

Disqus Threaded Comments

Introduction of threaded comments on ActiveRain can contribute greatly to foster and encourage discussions as well as make the process easier and more pleasant.

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/30/2008 03:45 PM   Comments (22)   blogging, comments, threaded comments  
Search Engines can not tell apart one image from another. In fact, as Matt Cutts of Google explains in the video, a search engine can not tell whether or not a picture is of a dog or a cat. Webmasters, however can describe images posted on their websites using "title" and "alt" attributes within the image tag. The video below explains in detail how to do just that.
Every real estate website has a great opportunity to improve their websites visibility on the search engines by just describing the photos of homes. It is also should be mentioned that real estate websites can benefit more than any other website, because the content that consists of listings, is unique because no one else has a listed (hopefully) the home you are selling.
 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/30/2008 01:27 AM   Comments (16)   seo, images  
The RealBird Blog just announced new feature called RealBird Virtual Tour. RealBirds nifty widget allows real estate agents create a "mini-showcase" of their listings while offering an opportunity for viral marketing, and allowing bloggers or any webmasters to grab the code and feature the listings on their websites or blogs. The new feature ads Google Maps Street view to the lower par of the widget and comes at $9.99 per listing or $14.99 when purchased with a property domain name:
RealBird Virtual Tour
The Google Maps of this version is unique in itself as it offers map view, satellite view, hybrid view, terrain view as well as Google Earth. Just taking a look at few of the featured listings, they need to be more optimized. The images are downloading rather slow even though I have a cable connection. The slow load may be caused by the scripts as well. Overall it is a nice addition to their product. The "branded virtual tours" offer users an opportunity to share the tours on variety of social networking websites as well as easy way to publish information to their blogs. Personally I would prefer to grab the code via "copy and paste" as it was the case with their former widget, since I do not like to give away the user name and the password to my blog. What do you think about this new feature? Originally posted on Go Beyond MLS.
 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/25/2008 12:59 AM   Comments (2)   realbird, viral marketing  

Things to watch for when dealing with your webmaster.

Via Mary McKnight:

Back to the conversation about hidden text.  Recently I have seen 3 sites banned (completely de-indexed) from Google because a web developer thought they could artificially boost the SEO of a site by injecting hidden text into the template.  This is what I call, Case of the Idiot Web Developer.

What is hidden text? 

Hidden text is text you place on your website that is typically keyword rich, invisible to a user but evident to a search engine.  Hmmm... sounds a lot like spam, huh?  Well, that is exactly how Google sees it! SPAM!  And what happens to spammers in Google?  They get banned - i.e. de-indexed. 

Read also: Is Your Real Estate Blog Keyword Spamming Behind Your Back?

What are the most common ways you or your web developer can place hidden text in your website or blog?

  • 1. Make the text the same color as the background
  • 2. Set the CSS for the text to display:none

  • 3. Make the text tiny timey like a 1-3pt font

How do you check if your site is spamming and/or has hidden text?

Use This Tool to Check for Keyword Spamming:  spam detector tool

***FYI: CSS attributes with visibility set to none are very common today as more and more sites are CSS driven, this is not always indicative of spamming and should be ignored like the tools own disclaimer notes.  However, if the CSS attribute contains text - especially keyword rich text, IT IS SPAM!

Example of what a site spamming with hidden text and keywords

*Please note, this site has since been fixed!

What does Google do to sites with hidden text in them?

Hidden text is considered a spamdexing tactic And Google has long banished sites with hidden text from its index.  Back in the 90s it was common to inject hidden text into sites and see huge gains in search engines as this text could artificially boost the keyword density of a page and therefore make it seem extremely relevant to a user's search criteria.  But this tactic has been a no-no for years.  In fact, it has been

Case study of how an idiot web developer got one blog banned

The sad story of a Pasadena real estate blog:

In late July, Irina Netchaev received an email from Google about her blog.  Imagine her shock when she found that Google was going to de-index her for spamming with hidden text.  Well, Irina called up her web development company and asked what this was all about.  The receptionist initially told her that Google didn't send the email.

Pasadena real estate blog

This is the exact email Irina received from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of pasadenacarealestatehomes.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from pasadenacarealestatehomes.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on pasadenacarealestatehomes.com:

e.g. Pasadena, San Marino, Monterey Hills, San Gabriel, South Pasadena, Monterey
Hills, Arcadia, Alhambra, Altadena, Sierra Madre, Highland Park, Temple
City, Duarte, La Canada

We would prefer to have your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please visit:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en

to learn more and request a reconsideration request.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Sounds pretty official to me, what about you?  I'm thnking I must be a real detective because the Google.com email is what tipped me off to this email being the real deal (the subsequent deindexing was the clincher, though).  When Irina called her web development company, Develement, LLC, the receptionist made assertions that there wasn't spam in her site.  So, Irina called me.  A simple look inside the code showed obvious spam included with the following tag <H2><SITE:TAGLINE /></h2> which translated to a list of keywords being injected in an H2 tag that was set in the CSS to display:none. I took her index html file and made the change which was simply either taking out the tag alltogether or setting the CSS to display the text visibly.  I sent the file to Irina and she sent it to her development company - this was their response:

Hi Mary,

Just had a call from Tom Balletta who advised me that he will NOT upload the file that I sent to Nicole.  He said that it was a proprietary file worked by "someone" outside of his office and it can maliciously damage my site.  I pressed him on it and he still refused.

He claims that his programmers made the necessary fixes to my site and that he doesn't know why Google flagged it, but there were as he calls it "inappropriate" key words that were not relating the content.  He refused to tell me which keywords he was referring to and was quite arrogant - quite a character!

Not sure if you had a chance to take a look at the way the site looks now and if it's okay to resubmit. 

Let me know your thoughts.

Thank you,

Irina Netchaev

Now, of course, all these "programmers" (I take offense to people who only know graphics, HTML, CSS, Flash and just enough Javascript to be dangerous calling themselves "programmers" as any idiot with a computer can make a webpage, but that is another post for another day) did was change her title tag but never set the CSS to visible or removed the tag.  Not exactly a fix in Google's eyes.  Nevertheless, Irina's site was banned from Google.

This is what a site query of a banned website looks like:

Pasadena Real Estate Blog with 0 indexed pages

Did Irina's web company choose to help her after the ban?  NO.  They let her twist in the wind (continuing to charge her, of course, for their stellar service and expertise!)  while she watched her leads dwindle to 0.  So, Irina, came to me to get her site fixed.

How do you fix a banned site?

  • 1. You fix the offending code
  • 2. You join Google Webmaster Tools
  • 3. You request reinclusion
  • 4. Then you wait however long it takes for a human being at Google to review your site and re-include you. This can take several weeks
  • 5. At the same time you request reinclusion on the banned domain - you bring up a sister site alongside the banned domain that will be indexed. In Irina's case, we brought up another Pasadena site alongside the banned one. This site looks exactly the same as the old site with all the same content sans the offending code. You might recall when I used this same tactic for Cyndee Haydon when one of her sites experienced a Google penalty back in December. This is the key to getting your leads back in short order while you wait for Google to re-index the banned site.

To help Irina, link to her sister blog at www.pasadenaviews.com

Things to do while awaiting reinclusion:

  • 1. Add new content to the new clean domain
  • 2. Build 10-100 backlinks to the new domain to let Google know it is trusted (start with ActiveRain and Localism and your various social profiles, make sure you post all new content to Twitter)
  • 3. Force a site-wide ping of the new domain to put you back in Google's good graces.

 Things not to do while awaiting reiclusion:

  • 1. Do not redirect the banned domain to the new clean domain while awaiting reinclusion
  • 2. Do not add new content to the banned domain - it is a waste of time

So, while this post may have been harsh, it shows exactly how an idiot web developer can cause your site to get banned through no fault of yours and why you need to stay on top of your site structure and coding.  If you have a Dev Element blog, you need to start checking for spam tags, we have found that they have been injecting spam into their sites for at least the past 2 months.  My recommendation to these "programmers" - don't play with SEO if you don't know what you are doing - leave that to the big kids - go back to your box of crayola's and draw! While you are playing in the sandbox with your fingerpaints, why don't you look up how to read obfuscated JavaScript, I hear you also can't do that!  FYI - real "programmers" can.  Want a lesson?  I'd be happy to put together a remedial class, but be sure to wer your helmet - the short bus ride to the tard factory can be bumpy.

 Yes, Devidiots, I mean Develement... I'm pissed that you caused good bloggers this kind of heartache, took their money and refused to help when you had the chance.  You can't even clean up your own mess.  I think the industry term for that is irresponsible parasite.

Related Posts

Stop Word List
Google Slaps Real Estate Blogs in Latest PageRank Update
Google drops blogs. Are you a victim?
Is the Blogroll on Your Real Estate Blog Damaging Your Street Cred?
The Real Estate Blogger's Guide to SEO

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/25/2008 12:16 AM   Comments (1)  

I am not sure I will ever write another blog post here again. With several blogs and a new business, I may be short on time to write another post on Active Rain.

Yes you can consider me an outsider, although I have a few friends on Active Rain. Not so long ago I even had some hostile attitude towards blogs here as I experimented with a “top 100 real estate blogs”. I saw ActiveRain as website with the unfair advantage over a “poor” blogger who just started her or his blog. After all ActiveRain has over 100,000 members who can contribute to create content for this website. Just imagine if every member just wrote two blog posts every month. No other website would be able to keep up with “ActiveRainers”. Now that I come to love this wonderful community, I feel a little sad that members of ActiveRain are not as “active” as they should be. I imagine that those members who are actively blogging here can confirm some of the benefits I am about to list.

Active Rain Helps To Promote You Locally

Yes, it may sound strange that website somewhere in WA can promote you locally even though you may live on the other end of the country. As may already know ActiveRain groups their members by the state of their residence. This information you provide when you join this community. Then you are “placed” in a county and in a city or town, as highlighted in the snapshot from my own account below:

ActiveRain Helps To Promote Yourslef Locally

Because ActiveRain has great authority in the search engines, even if you are not contributing much to this community, your ActiveRain profile page is probably already is being returned in top 50 results on Google for your own name or maybe some other keywords. I almost certain that this post along may move my profile page few dozen positions up on Google for my own name.

ActiveRain Helps Those Who Help Themselves

You may already noticed from the snapshot above that members here can earn points, which in turn are used to rank you among the other members. It is still hard to believe that even with very little activity here I am ranked 952 in New Jersey. Certainly out of 3,000+ members from New Jersey my place should be somewhere among the last 100, if not the last one. The reason you want to be active on ActiveRain is you will earn more points and will rank closer to the top. So the link to your ActiveRain profile will be placed on better ranking pages of ActiveRain.

ActiveRain Points

One of the things that many take for granted here on ActiveRain is that from your profile page as well as from your blog page you can link freely to your websites or blogs with SEO friendly links. Thus transferring some of “juice” from the search engines back to your websites or blogs. As I mentioned before, I may never post here again. But I am grateful to ActiveRain for changing my perception of what this community is about.

So go ahead (New Jersey members) an knock me down where I belong, among the last 100 members, if not the last.

 
Posted by Vlad Zablotskyy on 08/25/2008 12:08 AM   Comments (10)   activerain, seo, blogging  
 
P1020992b Rainmaker_large

Vlad Zablotskyy

Jackson, NJ

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