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Yahoo - Who Knew?

By Andrew Hodge

Real Estate Agent with Right At Home Realty Inc.

March 07, 2007 11:59 PM

Well I have been confounded by Yahoo again. For some reason nothing that I do to promote my sites on Yahoo ever seem to work. In the early days, when I had little success with the big G, I had a trickle of traffic that cam through Yahoo. However, I have never managed to get added to their directory even after a year and a half of submitting my sites (not on a regular basis and not through a service that might be considered spam). For some Reason I can be number one in Google and off the top 5 pages on Yahoo.

So you may understand my shock to find this result on Yahoo under the term "Real Estate Market Aurora Ontario". I was following the referral links to my York Region Real Estate Blog which is found at the number 6 position on this list. Having my blog on the list is not odd, because it does address the markets in Aurora, Ontario. What is odd is the first two links.

Both of these links are mine, except that they were experiments that I had started on my ISPs free site and never did anything to promote them. I had originally started the pages while playing with the idea of creating custom forms and frame them into my websites, but I ended up trashing the idea as I would lose a lot of the other features that P2 has in respect to "prospects" (sms, stats, email template, drip campaign etc...).

The top one only has a title and and a statement that the site is no longer in use. I am not sure why I even changed it to have that message, but it was probably so that if someone happen to get lost and find it they would not be waiting for me to contact them when I was not connecting to it.

I did a little checking and it also does fairly well in "Real Estate Aurora Ontario" and "Real Estate Aurora" (from the "Canadian sites"). So I am baffled, but it seems I am going to have to reopen that site at least to direct people to one of my working sites, and to update the contact information on the "index" page.

Does anyone have any insights as how an un-marketed site like this could rank at all let alone be 1 and 2? Especially when there are several other sites below that would be much more relevant and Google doesn't even have it Cached! I don't know if I should be happy for the opportunity or disappointed in Yahoo's algorithms

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Agent Web Design

Specialists Real Estate - Las Vegas, NV

Yahoo search results are horrible. I have researched several markets and the top 20 sites on Google all blow the top 20 sites on Yahoo out of the water. Don't use Yahoo as a gage for your SEO success. Google is the benchmark. Yahoo is unpredictable and as you mentioned their algorithms are pathetic. At some point they will get on the ball and you will see their results shaken up dramatically.

Mar 08, 2007 05:19 AM

Win Singleton

Summit Web Design and Long & Foster Realtors - Falls Church, VA

Web Designer & Associate Broker

Where to begin?

I disagree with the previous comment. In the Washington DC area, Google search results are dominated by large real estate directories and listing aggregators (the likes of "Homegain" or "Trulia", etc.), almost to point that maybe only a handful of individual real estate brokerage firms and agents show up in the Top 30 at all. For example, a search for "Arlington VA real estate" only shows 3 "real" agents' sites in the Top 20 results. I know them, because I built all 3 of those sites for my clients. If someone is searching for an actual agent in that area, they will have a hard time finding a "real" agent in Google in our area! So if Google is the benchmark, consumers here are not able to find good "recommendations".

But back to your question... it is real easy to rank at the top of the results for a search phrase that no one is targeting. A nice, free tool that you can use to see how "real people" (not REALTORS) are performing their searches can be found over at Overture.com - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - where you can type in any search phrase you want to see what they report. For example, the phrase, "Real Estate Market Aurora Ontario" produced no results at all for any searches done in January, 2007. But "homes for sale in Aurora Ontario" showed 96 searches. And "Aurora Ontario real estate" showed 52 searches. "Richmond Hill Ontario real estate" showed 202 searches and "Richmond Hill Ontario homes for sale" showed 105 searches during the same time.

Obviously, at some point, the Yahoo! searchbot came by your old blog site and indexed it. Then when you were performing a search that virtually no else does, Yahoo! tried to match your search phrase and showed you these results. Notice the URL for the search results at the top of Yahoo! included "...search?p=real+estate+market+aurora+ontario..." One time I had one of my own clients ask, "Why don't I come up for 'Realtors in Northern Virginia'"? I had to tell him that no one is performing that search... except for him! Consumers are searching instead for Northern Virginia real estate, or Fairfax VA real estate, etc. It is real easy to be a "big frog in a little pond"... and in this case, you must be the biggest! ;-)

BTW, I went to your Point2Agent site and tried to send you an email about all of this, and I couldn't get the email link on the right of your home page to work for me. Don't know what that is all about, but you might want to test it.

Mar 08, 2007 06:36 AM

Andrew Hodge

Right At Home Realty Inc. - Richmond Hill, ON

Hi Win, I understand the big fish in the small pond, but the other sites that are below mine should have been seen as more relevant, after all there is next to no content on the one that was in first. As I mentioned, the only reason I looked at the phase is because someone used it to get to my site earlier today. Those other terms you mentioned are all great terms and my other sites rank fairly well for them. What surprised me is that this site have not real content, no in bound links (except from the page that ranked second which had limited content and no links from outside) and Google has not even Cached it. Yet Yahoo put it at the top when my blog and several of my websites should qualify for the term much better that these pages from a long forgotten site. I don't even know the password to log in anymore and will have to call my ISP to reset it.

I do agree with the whole Homegain/trulia problem. There should be way that REALTORS® can trounce them when it comes to back-links etc.

What I find most odd is that this site can get ranked on Yahoo, but the other sites that I have that do well on MSN and Google rarely show up on any terms, that they are targeted for, in Yahoo. These pages also terned up in other variations on terms about Aurora real estate as well and there should be more competition for those ones.

It just seems a little odd.

P.S. Does anyone know how to get Google or Yahoo to understand that you are located in Canada with a .com URL. I see some but mine never seem to make it. I even switched the company that I have the URLs registered with to have them registered with a Canadian company, but that does not seem to have helped. I also signed up my main site for the Google local results where they confirm the business address. S.E.s can be a real pain in the back side sometimes.

Mar 08, 2007 08:28 AM

Agent Web Design

Specialists Real Estate - Las Vegas, NV

Win: Regardless of what search engine we like better or has given desired results in the past (we both know there are a million articles out there to support any engine) my response above should have been the following...

Andrew: There are only really three things you can do to guide or affect any site's search engine placement in Google or Yahoo or ask.com or any other engine: write great content, invite/create/pay for strong inbound links, or pay for ad space.

If you want Google or Yahoo to know you are from Canada then your content must state that enough that the engines pick up on it and there must be links to your site also suggesting you are from Canada OR you can pay per click and define your geographical location. If a page disappears for a period we get to be patient and keep promoting the site. It's possible that pages fall off because other web masters are promoting their pages or because a spider misses a page and it doesn't index it based on a million algorithmic factors or their servers (which are many and independent of each other) are reindexing the sites and they temporarily pull the page. Creating an authority site for your area and giving off that presence to the engines is how you rise to the top and remain at the top...think "great content", "great links", "great content", "great links", "great content", "great links". Your search engine area of influence resides in those factors whether you do the work yourself or pay for it.

Other suggested articles regarding SEO (also written by different authors as the links above):

Oh yeah, and as Win stated, Overture is a great tool to use.

Mar 08, 2007 12:40 PM

Rob Parker

London web Marketing - Toronto, ON

Content - Content - Content, I can tell you that is what works with Yahoo, my suspicion is you're working like crazy on off page stuff for Google and not putting effort into good contnet for Yahoo and MSN. If you want to rank well on all 3 you have to work everything in. I work on many sites including some in your area and I'm nomrally consistent across the big 3 even htough it may be differnet pages that are ranked.

Also when you do havel inking opportunities make good use of them. You are highly ranked here in Activerain but I don't see you making Goog use of that to link to your site *W*

Mar 12, 2007 04:22 AM