My Experience Working for One of Those Real Estate Website Companies...

Al, while much of what you say is true, agents should be aware that it IS possible to do a great job with SEO on an individual cookiecutter site and some cookiecutter site offer much more than simply IDX. I prefer to customize Point2Agent sites because they offer lots of valuable features, are highly customizable, and CAN be SEO'd to the max. For me, P2A provides the best of both worlds, allowing me to create a hybridization of a custom design combined with the features of a cookiecutter site.

Point2Agent offers tools and services well beyond those that an individual Web site design can offer, in terms of advertising syndication, handshake listings, drip email, integrated blogging, and so on. Handshake listings and syndication can bring lots of visitors to a site that's too new to do much in the SEs. Until someone from Point2Agent asked me to consider customizing P2A sites last year, I was of basically the same opinion of cookiecutter sites (in fact, one of my domains is anticookiecuttersites.com) but I have changed my tune after working on P2a sites for a year.

I've seen Point2Agent and Advanced Access sites get great SERPS, but not simply by using the tools provided by the companies, some of which are quite lame. (Point2Agent, for example, still leads users down the merry path of optimizing keyword meta tags without telling them that they are, for the most part, useless.) With the right skills and knowledge, both AA and P2A sites can be optimized quite nicely, but I would use an outside consultant rather than relying on the provider. Jay Thompson, for example, knows the full range of SEO for Point2Agent sites and provides his services at a modest cost.

Suzanne Stephens, Point2Agent Design Partner 

Hi Al,

Thanks for being honest and sharing your experience with SEO and one of the major cookie-cutter websites. 

wow - that was a very honest post. A little brutal to ughhhmm the named victims, but I can definitely see the complications that arise there.

I worked for those companies once and was hired to do "SEO" for their sites. Well - I never got real far with the SEO. The reason? This company's sites were all built on the same faulty platform. The coding was wrong, the URL structures sucked, there was code bloat, duplicate and unoriginal content, server-side programming errors (www.domain.com vs. domain.com compliance errors), and soooo much more.

When I told them what I would need to do, I was told that I could not mess with the coding because it would break every website they had.

It is certainly hard to learn how to fix a site for seo. There is certainly a core structure that is required for good ranking. I know this doesn't apply to the sites you're talking about, but say for example an all flash site would have problems (just for anyone else reading this)

You're first blog here is a rant on a subject sure to hear some noise. I'm interested to see future posts with some info on best selection of an seo company and best practices etc.

Al, I have a template site from Number 1 Expert. I have been sending them things to do for months now that I am learning so much on Activerain. They think I am nuts.........but my rankings have increased from page 40 on Google to page 1 for some search terms. My AR blog does better in most cases.

I really want a custom site with a blog platform that would be the best of 2 worlds.

I have also been optimizing my Point 2 Site and it is moving up too. But, I think it because I can now blog on it.

What say you ?

Al, this is an excellent post.

Thank you for sharing.  I've subscribed and look forward to more of your blogs in the future.  

Thanks for your input. What you are saying about using a template and then applying SEO makes sense.

I'm subscribing!