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Are your listings helping or hurting your Google ranking?

Syndicating listings to 3rd party websites should be part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. It's a simple formula; you allow your listings to be published on other websites in exchange for a link back to your site. Link building, as the SEOs call it, is by far the most effective way to get good content to show up on Google's first page and listings are a broker's best option for link building. You may have heard it said that 'content is king' of SEO but links are queen. If two sites have similar content, the one with the most links typically wins.

The twist in this tail is that sending your listings to most 3rd party real estate listings sites is not helping your site's SEO and may well be hurting it. Many listings sites employ technologies to ensure that your site is invisible to Google. There are a lot of sneaky tricks to this but to keep it simple, there's one main thing that you should be checking your links for - and that is nofollow tags.

Checking links for nofollow tags.

The oldest trick in the book is easy to spot. If a 3rd party site has added the tag "rel=nofollow" to your links then the search engines will not follow the link and will not find your site. For example, this link to my profile on Zillow is followed by google but this link is not yet they go to the same place. You can check for nofollow tags by clicking on View --> Source in your browser window to check your links. I personally prefer to use a firefox plugin that highlights nofollow links for me. You can get the plugin I'm using here - when it's installed, right-click the "q" in your firefox tool tray and select "highlight nofollow links" and it will cause nofollow links to be highlighted in red. For example, Prudential Northwest and Mike Kass (pictured left) have invested in showcase ads on Realtor.com but they receive no SEO benefit from any of the links to their websites from those listings. Mike and Prudential Northwest will get more SEO benefit from this blog post than they do from syndicating their listings to Realtor.com.

Note: when you dive into this, you are going to see a lot of red links and it's important to remember that they are not all evil! There are some good reasons for using nofollow and google has clear guidelines that explain how nofollow should be used. All you need to know is that none of the good reasons for using nofollow apply to links on syndicated listings and honestly, it's surprising that this hostile behavior is the norm in our industry. Nofollow is the most common mechanism used to ensure that listings partners don't get SEO benefit from the links on their listings but there are two other technical issues related to this problem that I'll touch on very briefly here ...

Checking links for 301 redirects.

It's quite common that websites move their pages around. When they do that, and to ensure that old links still work, the old URLs are redirected to their new location. Redirects are how you sometimes end up on a web site that's different to the link you thought that you clicked on and are quite commonly used by real estate sites to send click traffic through an intermediary server for counting purposes (Zillow does this). Redirects will only be followed by search engines if they are of a specific type; namely a 301 redirect. Redirected links come in many flavors but all you need to look for is the 301 - links to pages with other types of redirects may as well have a nofollow tag because search engines will ignore them. Checking for 301 redirects is as easy as entering the listing's link into a form and reading the results. There are numerous free redirect checkers online - I'm currently using this one.

Beware of Java Script

If the link to your listing from a 3rd party website looks something like this: "javascript:noop();" you are probably not getting any SEO benefit from it. Search engines can't read the dynamic content that javascript delivers (which is why AJAX has lost some of its lustre.) I should add that there's currently some debate about whether google is learning to read javascript but from what I've seen, it's not happening much and it should be simple for you and your listings partner to test - just check whether a unique URI to one of your your listings gets indexed by Google (i.e. search for it) after it's syndicated to a site (like Roost) that uses javascript.

Now, go and check on your listings!

Full disclosure: I work at Zillow.com. Listings posted to Zillow earn SEO benefit for your web site but don't just take my word for it, go and test the links to your listings on Zillow.com for nofollows, javascript and 301 redirects. And then go and check the links from your listings on other sites and let me know what you find - you may be surprised.

Update: ... and this is a followed link to the mortgage website findmyloanonline. If you want to know why it's here you'll have to read the comments.

2nd Update ... passing some link love on to Erc Bramlett's contribution to this discussion (see comments.)

3rd Update ... why do I feel I've been link-baited ;-) Check out Bill Gasset's Hopkinton Homes For Sale (MLS listings.)

Posted by David Gibbons on 09/25/2008 02:12 AM

Comments (134)

SEO in the Online Marketing Channel

Post is included in group: Addicted to Active Rain
Post is included in group: Blogging & SEO
Post is included in group: Zillow Discussion Group

134 Comments on Are your listings helping or hurting your Google ranking?

SEP

2008

Wow...great information, a bit compex for me but informative nontheless..Kelly Willey

Thanks for the tips I kind of figured why would they want somebody to get benefit from their ranking.

Aloha David,

Great information. As everyone know you want your site to come up on that first page. Anything that we can do do improve our score is a positive.

Aloha nui loa

Bill

Nofollow links make link building a waste of time.

What a lot of great information! Yes, it does seem a little overwhelming but incredibly informative. Thanks for the head's up.

Kelly - thanks! If you want to know if your listings are benefiting your sites SEO, post a link to a few of them here and I'll check it for you.

Bill - Aloha

Joe - noooooo, just the opposite is true. Nofollow makes link building all that more important (and difficult) ... but your response does explain why www.findmyloanonline.com ranks 21st on google for "findmyloanonline." It's almost unbelievable that your domain isn't ranked first for such a distinct keyword. The good news is that you have MASSIVE upside potential for organic web traffic via SEO. Here's a followed link to your awesome mortgage website to get you started and here's one more link to findmloanonline just for good measure.

Dang - sorry Joe, I see now that comment links here are nofollow'd (probably a good idea) but I'll make it up to ya with an update to my blog post.

Hi David! Do you have a list of those providers that do this? I use Point2 for one of my websites and listings are posted automatically to a number of sites. I would love to know who does this 'automatically' and in blanket fashion to all listings so that I could avoid them!

Thanks for posting this--I've got alot of homework to do now!

Debe in Charlotte

SEP

2008

Thanks for the tips. Always good to learn more ways to help our SEO.

Good question. I hope it's helping! Not hurting! LOL.

David,

Thank you so much for sharing this information to all the REALTORS out there. The information we supply to third party sites in terms of listings (Content) should be rewarded back to us.

Without our listings.. there is little reason to visit the third party sites. Nice Post!

Hey Dave, when i click the link that you said does not work and viewed page source, i did not find the do not follow tag you were describing. Where is it in the code?

Ronnie,

Download and use Firefox as your internet browser. Make sure you install the SEO tools and enable the tool that highlights no-follow links. The No-Follow links will show up in Pink and you'll easily see who is using you for your content -- which builds up their sites but not yours.

Ronnie -

Sorry if that was confusing. I didn't link to the listing on Realtor.com (here it is) - I linked to the agent and broker who should have received the link love from their listing. You should see - rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mikekass.com" on the first nofollow link.

Thanks excellent information it will take me a minute to digest it but, I understand and now have to go back and look at all those links.

David: Always good to have you drop by and helping our members to better understand the benefits/differences among 3rd party aggregators.

Wow. What an eye opening post. Thank you.

You are right on the no follow on all my syndication but Zillow. I will add you to my home page now. I didnt realize ALL had no follow tags.

Hi David,

I have several points to add to your terrific post:

The red highlighting on the SEO for Firefox is hard on the eye. You can change that to any color you like, I use a light gray. Go to Tools, SEO for Firefox and Options, there you will find a link to change your highlight color. Much easier on the eye.

301 redirects can be particularly nasty. One evening, not too long ago, I found an Active Rain post on the search engines that I was certain I had put into draft mode. When I clicked on it, I discovered that it took me to the front page of Localism. Imagine my surprise! Further invesitgation found that ALL of my draft posts had been re-directed to the front page of Localism. Funny thing is, I remember Matt putting in writing that the content belonged to us. If I wanted to take one out of draft mode, I couldn't. That doesn't sound like I own the content now does it? Oh and by the way, redirecting those posts also redirected the back-links those posts had earned. I went on a delete fest.

This online business sucks sometimes. ActiveRain should have disclosed their intent to do this to the OWNERS of the content and given them the right to decide where their content and backlinks were most usefull. Personally, I would like the ability to redirect any of my AR draft posts to another AR post to beef it up on the engines, as I have the ability to do on my own blogs.

Oh and by the way, I put up a listing post on my personal blogs tonight, it was on page one in less than an hour, above all of the big sites.

I resigned from Prudential about a month ago and moved to an independent boutique brokerage who does NOT syndicate MY listings to anybody.

NEVER will I contribute to a company who steals my leads. YES, it is lead theft.

When Realtors work to enhance their business, infusing their cash and labor toward building a reputation in order to drive business to their door it comes in the form of listings and buyers. Listings drive a lot of business to these Realtors in the way of more listings and buyers. When a company redirects those leads to themselves for distribution to others for their gain and not that Realtors then that is THEFT, plain and simple.

All Realtors should either leave any brokerage who would sell them out or stop taking listings!

Sound harsh?

Think about it as it if were your money and business!

Geez David I think you hit a few of my raw nerves! :)

David: Excellent information. I have seen these links in Craig's List postings all the time and wondered what they meant. Thanks for sharing!

Hi David - thanks for the info in this post. I will be working on checking this out for my own posts.

Laurie - thanks for that tip to change the color. The red had really been bothering my eyes, too. I did not know that posts in draft mode might be showing up anyway. I'll have to go check mine out as I have a number of them in draft mode. I wonder why something in draft, which means we didn't want it published, would actually show up anywhere. That makes no sense to me at all. I own the content, I should be able to choose when it gets published anywhere.

Ann

Ann,

The actual draft post isn't showing up, when you click on it you will find that the post has been redirected to the front page of localism. The post does show up in a Google search with its original title and subtext, but it directs elsewhere. They are redirecting the juice from these posts to beef up localism which has little juice.

Oh, my head is swimming after reading this--I need my coffee first. Thanks--I'll be back to read this again.

I am lost as a goose! I am going to have to study more!

Good info! Dealing with SEO issues has become a whole task unto itself. Oh boy.

David, thanks. and Amen to Suzanne's comment above. All of this can be a little discomforting. I keep looking for that perfect assistant that's bilingual, a SEO expert, can do flip videos,

A lot of good info. I had no idea about all this...thanks.

great info. Thanks for the post.

That totally ticks me off that Realtor.com employs no follow tags, considering ALL the money we pay those charlatans for enhanced listings. Of course, that actually benefits those with fewer listings in an area than those with tons of listings - the little guys would be creamed by the "powerhouse" listing offices...but still.

Wow! Thank you for the post. It is very informative. I have my work cut out for me. One can sure see why they call it a web. You can really get tangled up in it.

I'm sure this is great information, but it is way too complicated for me. Isn't there a source somewhere for technically challenged people to learn?

Thanks for the information. What would you do with it?

Great info David. Just one quick question. You mentioned that this approach can actually hurt your SEO. Can you expand on that? I agree that a nofollow doesn't help your SEO, but I can't see how it can hurt your SEO. Google has been clear that nofollow doesn't mean you think it's a bad website. I guess the only possible "hurt" that one could receive as a result is the fact that agents are supplying their listings to help a website that doesn't give back (link juice that is). So as a result, these sites may rank higher due to the fact that they are a more popular resource. But then again, if sites like Trulia and Zillow are a great resource, then agents can still benifit from them. Not for the link juice, but simply the exposure and "eyeballs" for their listings.

Wow, both the blog and the comments/discussions are incredibly helpful. I'v e bookmarked this because as an SEO newbie I have a lot of work to do on this.

Wow...I did not know anything about the nofollow links at all...thank you for the info...I'm going to have to install that plugin.

David - While I am an avid supporter of the zillow site and put all my listings there, the majority of the site that would pass any link juice back to a Realtor is marked NO FOLLOW. All the pages that have PAGE RANK that a Realtor can add information to are "no follow". Why not remove the no follow on these pages? If you were that interested in passing the "juice" we both know that these are places Realtors would reap the most benefit.

Thanks for sharing - I am going to go see about the nofollows...

Wow, David, I'm not a geek but learn more every day. Another great article for me to print out and work on today as long as it's cold, windy, and rainy here in NC.

Thanks!

i appreciate your posting this info and will bookmark it for further review. I am still wading through the ever changing SEO landscape and have to improve on my learning curve! Thank you!

Thanks David. I am learning lots about this SEO stuff lately.

So much technology; so little time! Thanks for the information. I will bookmark this so I can refer back to it when I am feeling a little more technilogical! :o)

AWESOME POST! I have learned ALL of my SEO stuff from here on AR and thanks so much for sharing. I am completely self taught and know that there is sooo much information out there, but THANKS for taking the time to share your knowledge with us ALL here on AR!

Great post to bookmark!

Great Info... Thanks!

Nick Good

Keller Williams Realty

www.NickGood.com

Great Post. A little overwhelming for me at first. I'm learning all I can about SEO.

Great information, thank you. I had no idea there was such a thing. Sneaky stuff out there.

Yo David -

I see you folks expanded your ad campaign:

http://www.zillow.com/profile/Cialis-Online

Bob

David: I was wondering...do you think Oswald acted alone, or was there a second shooter on the grassy knoll?

Wow, even for those of us who aren't Realtors and don't have listings to post, this is some very important information...Thanks for posting this! I have several websites for different reasons and I needed to know most of this.

I'm confused by several things....Laurie Manny has me disturbed. Is this happening to my old posts on Localism??? Is my hard work and creative energy being directed to Localism's main page????

Second, I'm confused over the Zillow no follow thing - David says there are no "no follow" tags, yet Bill says that the pages have no follow tags.

My head hurts.

I do know that if my old localism posts are not going to MY POST but to the main page of Localism, then I will be deleting them as well! SOrry this is off topic...

There's so much controversy with follow vs. no-follow tags. It gets tiring.

I am disturbed about draft posts showing up on localism with redirects though. Didn't know that. Will have to be careful about it in the future. Thanks Laurie for the heads up!

Great post. Very informative, but a little confusing. Where can I learn the basics of link exchange, nofollow, etc?

It figures realtor.com is using nofollow tags

David - thanks for all the details and examples - you clarified some points for me. I guess like Brad points out - you have to decide if "the eyeballs" those other sites give you and your listing are of value (versus just SEO) I find posting about my own listings on my blogs gives them great exposure (since few do this) and since I don't work for a brokerage that "sells leads" - for now it seems like I'm giving a little and getting a little - just not in SEO currency.

I am curious about the answer to Bill Gassett's question about why zillow does no follow in pages that would pass pagerank to agents - that would seem like the "agent friendly" thing to do. Is that your goal or is the first "follow" link you showed just a fluke - since you obviously understand the benefits it's not an oversight - would love to understand more!

Hi David,

I'm new to Active Rain, and still trying to find my way around, but your article is one of the first I've read and I found it very interesting - so I wanted to thank you and offer the following comments.

Just finished a technology seminar yesterday sponsored by our local MLS Board in Bradenton, FL, and their were a number of discussions about best ways to enhance our listing exposure. About 100 agents in attendence. The highest attended session was for Active Rain. 4 sessions in all, Several of the speakers said that they endorsed sending our listings to 3rd party Syndicators like Zillow.com, but then there was a speaker (Successful agent that were handling various pieces of the seminar) that said he does not want to send his listings to Zillow or Trulia because of the supposed ultimate goal of those companies - which he said was to pull in more listings to drive traffic - so they could then entice agents to advertise the listings at a cost.

I just went to Zillow.com for the first time to see what it would cost to advertise a listing as a type of "featured listing" for my favorite local zip code, and the range was $57 to $228 to advertise one of my listings for 30 days in that zip code. Not saying this is a horrible thing because if the site actually brings in 15,000 projected viewings for $228, then that may be a great marketing opportunity, but curious about about whether or not just putting a standard listing on your site can do any harm. Seems like more exposure is better, especially if it's at no cost to us. I will be trying to learn more about Zillow and how it can benefit our Seller Clients with regard to the possible extended exposure of their home for sale. Thank you.

Bill -

Zillow passes SEO benefit to Realtors on both their listings and on their profile pages. I am certain of that but please check it out. In fact, we currently allow you unlimited followed links from your profile but as I've discussed above, your listings are your most viable tool for massive scale link building. Don't be fooled into thinking that those are not valuable links - they are - I recently saw a stat that said that 92% of RE-related web traffic was looking at listings - getting indexed for everything else is not nearly as important as your listings.

And as I discussed above, there are are many good reasons to use nofollow. This web-page is a good example - AR follows the links in the post but not in the comments. Why? Commenters are far more difficult to moderate than authors. And so, it's common to add nofollow to contributions by anonymous users that may have no long-term relationship with the site for fear of spam (and it's a well-placed fear as we learnt with Zillow's wiki and Discussion forums.)

But even with nofollow'd links in forums and comments etc. I have at least one suggestion that would help a pro's SEO there .... when you contribute to comments the external links are typically nofollows BUT the internal links (to your profile when you comment) most often are followed. So, if you are an active commenter on a site like AR, your profile will still acrue page rank even if your comment links don't help you. Now you have a page with some authority that you can use by adding the right links to it (check out this profile for a good example.)

Bottom line - Zillow is one of few sites that pass benefit from your most valuable content, namely listings. If there are other pages on the site where you think we should be doing it but are not, I am all ears. Our goal is to help you succeed.

Thank you for this post. I have often wondered why certain articles and sites don't show up on google.

Thanks for the help!

I'm just starting to appreciate SEO, and you were very helpful in my better understanding this tool.

Do any of you realize that NO FOLLOW tags are only applicable to GOOGLE???

YAHOO gives you the backlinks even with the NO FOLLOW tags! :)

To Craig Wilson,

You say "if the site actually brings in 15,000 projected viewings for $228, then that may be a great marketing opportunity, but curious about about whether or not just putting a standard listing on your site can do any harm."

If you had an outside blog and had been working on it for 6 to 8 months you would likely be able to receive that traffic yourself - free. The consumer is putting local search terms into the search engine you need to be there to be found or the traffic goes to the sites that are there.

When you contribute your posts, Q & A answers, or anything to another site and put your local keywords there, you are flagging them to pass you in the engines and to go to the top in your local area.

Here in Long Beach for instance Zillow doesn't have a presence, but we Realtors are doing battle with Trulia, Yahoo, Homegain, Homesdotcom and a few others on the engines. Only 3 of us are surviving the onslaught, a few others are trying the rest can be found between pages 19 and 30 on Google. I know, I checked. I went looking for the Realtors who used to have a presence, even a minor one, in my area. They are toast!

Get a blog. Work your butt off on it. Learn everything you can and go for it! It CAN be done!

Sometimes I love Math.

Lets say a site is getting 3 million hits a month.

Lets divide that by the 50 States, I know that may be a bit inequitable, but humor me. That would be 60,000 hits per state, per month.

So for arguments sake, lets say each state had 5 cities, very conservative, that would be 12,000 hits per city, per month.

Cities are part of Counties and have many neighborhoods. So lets be ultra conservative here again and assume that each city has maybe 15 neighborhoods (ludicrously low I know) that would give each neighborhood 800 potential hits per month, spread out over their multitude of pages.

If each visitor visited an average of, lets say 2 pages, that would be about 400 sets of eyes on that site each month.

800 hits per month divided by 30 days is 26 or 27 hits to their site each day for each neighborhood and its not likely they are getting that many in most markets since the numbers I used here are ridiculousy low. Thier traffic is insignificant to us in our local markets!

Doesn't sound very appealing anymore, does it?

You can get thousands of hits per day on your own site. You can provide IDX that gives the consumer the ENTIRE MLS, not the bits and pieces exhibited by these large sites whose ultimate goal is to dominate the engines, bury Realtors and force us to purchase our business and hits from them.

Wake up and smell the coffee!

Brad Carroll -

Sure, I can explain how nofollows can hurt. Search engine ranking is relative - there can only be one site in the first, second, third slot etc. By syndicating your content, you enable 3rd party sites to get into the game and to rank for keywords contained in your listings. And that's OK if they're crediting you as the source but if they are not, you have two things to worry about .... 1) have you sent your listings to so many places who are also claiming to be the source that they displace you in the search results and 2) with so many sites claiming to be the source of the same listings content, is your listing being penalized as duplicate content. I would worry more about 1 than 2.

Laurie -

Thank you. Sounds like you're kicking ass and taking no prisoners! :-) Good suggestion about changing the color. I would suggest reasoning with the AR-gods. They get this stuff and I've found them to be generally very respectful of authors' rights to their own content. If they do it right it should be a win-win.

As for Yahoo! and MSN, the engines don't often explain their policies but we have it from very trusted sources that both sites do also respect nofollow. If you got that info from the wikipedia article on nofollow, ignore it - it's pretty inaccurate.

Devil's advocate on your comment about advertising ... "wow, 6-8 months worth of work for only $228" ... :-) ... yes, I am being cheeky! As you know, I am generally with you and believe that social media should be the foundation of any great consumer marketing strategy today but there certainly is a time and a place for using advertising to beef up your business.

Kay Bennet -

I had no idea that gooses got lost - we're learning from each other :-)

Bob -

That's funny - the SEO guy on my team also found that profile this morning. It's gone now but seemed to be a spammer from E. Europe. Thanks so much for highlighting it. Choosing to reward partners does come with the challenge of moderating abuse but we're working on an innovative solution that would only reward trusted partners for links on their profiles.

Karen Rice -

Sorry to make your head spin - see my response to Bill above.You certainly get SEO benefit from adding your lsiting and your profile to Zillow.

Cyndee -

See my response to Bill above. Brad's right - some sites have become so powerful that the average Realtor has little option but to continue posting there. I actually think the right response to this is not to immediately pull your listings but rather to focus more on syndicating to sites that help you and to open a dialog requesting a change from with those that don't. Also, you may not have the leverage to get a site to change its policy but your broker or franchise might - pass this info on to them. As for any new and small sites that nofollow your links - I would personally boycott them until they change policy. Sounds like you've got the blog listings working very well for you - fantastic - when you syndicate your listings do you syndicate the link to the blog posts or to your IDX site?

Craig -

With regards to the potential for harm, see my response to Brad above. The agent you mention was talking about what I like to call the "listings arbitrage strategy" - it's the business model of the new breed of middlemen who add no value but merely sell your audience back to you. This is another critical difference between Zillow and Trulia. Zillow created valuable new content (Zestimates) and attracted a massive audience before turning around and offering access to that audience to pro's - the other guys just scraped your listings from your websites and ranked in google for your content. It's important for RE pro's to partner with the media but to avoid this happening in the future, you should always ask your partner what new content and value they bring to the table.

Wow, what a bitter sweet thought. On the one hand, it's great to be able to tell potential sellers that when they sign up with us, their homes are automatically syndicated on a bazillion web sites. The sellers always seem delighted to hear that. But now, if I'm understanding you correctly, all this syndication makes the sellers feel warm and fuzzy, but for us...it's a dead end street that could ultimately end up hurting our positioning on a Google search. Hmmm....I'm off to check links right now! Thanks....

HI DAVID!

WHOA! OK it's going to take me some time to check this one, but thank you nonetheless!

David,

Yes cheeky :). Actually while social media does have its place for an agent with no presence, agents should be utilizing the social media sites while they are bringing up their own internet presence. Once they are established on the engines they should be VERY VERY choosy and pull back on sharing their information and keywords with the social media sites in favor of their own. NOTHING replaces your own presence.

Joel Singer, the executive VP of the California Assn of Realtors invited 4 Realtors from around the state to a roundtable earlier this year. Kevin Boer and myself were among the 4. The topic was social media and its effect on our business. While we all differed in how we operate on the internet, it was agreed across the board that social networking site do not send enough consumer traffic to spend more than a cursory amount of time on them. Social media sites have their place, but it should be extremely limited in favor of the agents sites. See the 5 page spread that was in the California Realtor June/July issue, currently posted at CAR.org in the newstand section. Somewhere on their site is a partial video from the roundtable as well.

Does advertising online have its place? Absolutely! If I want to break into a new neighborhood in which I do not have a strong presence, I would utilize it until I did. But then, that wouldn't take me very long.

When you build a powerful site and want to expand it is easier because you have the powerful site backing you up. So once again I say, go build you sites to Realtors.

David, did you notice my comment about MATH? My advertising dollars are directly influenced by the potential results they can garner. If you could show me that Zillow was getting over 500,000 hits in the Long Beach area, I might consider that to be a worthy place to fly a banner ad. However, everybody that has approached me has either not been able to provide accurate traffic numbers for the area or obviously fibbed.

REAL ESTATE IS LOCAL!!! Don't let ANYBODY get between YOU and the CONSUMER!!!

You didn't think I was going to let that slide, did you?

David while the profile page of an agent at your site does not have the no follow tag what good is it if these pages can not achieve any page rank? Even Greg's site that you provide in your link is UNRANKED. Anybody with even the slightest knowledge of SEO knows that a bunch of links with no page rank does not do much for you.

This is exactly what all the real estate directories do. The main page has a great PR and then when you sign up your link gets placed on a page with no rank. What your touting is basically the same thing.

There are places with in your site that would be very valuable to an agent such as the Real Estate professional directory that has a page rank of 4 or the blog directory which has a Page Rank of 5. These locations pass the "juice".

I would love it if you made these locations "do follow".

One more thing ...would you care to explain how your profile page has achieved a PR of 4? When looking at the content of your page there is nothing that I would say that makes it that much different as far as content goes other than the fact you have a video uploaded?

Hi Laurie (Laurie Manny, Long Beach CA Real Estate),

Thanks for your feedback. Regarding the blogging, I'm just getting started with plugging into this forum. Like many agents, I've spent $1000s on paying a number of internet companies to help me get higher rankings for my website higher rankings. Frankly, although our site gets a fair amount of traffic, seems like the past 24 months have been dismal for actual real leads that have come off the web - so have decided to be proactive and get plugged in to learn about the process - and see how we can learn, share and also at the same time benefit the web traffic for more potential clients.

Appreciate the advice. Looks like from your Active Rain stats that you've been at this a while, and you must know what you're doing... :).

Regards,

Craig@WilsonHOMETEAM.com

Sarasota-Bradenton, FL

Hi its Jermaine Broadnax from Homes.com I am a marketing specialist that works for Homes.Com. My company does hosting for your listings, host/design websites and various other marketing avenues for Realtors.

I just want to let you Know about a new campaign we just introduced to Realtors that we are only having 5 EXCLUSIVE top producing Realtors in each market area only. I will explain later why we only limited this marketing tactic to 5. This marketing package is called City Search Pro.

Which covers Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. And this will help you market your own personal website. For the Realtors who have not heard of SEO and SEM its real simple. SEO is the strategy used to increase your ranking score on Google, yahoo and other various search engines.

I am mainly trying to get life long clients limited to 5 per market area for promoting your website on Google's sponsored links and getting you more exposure on the front page of Google which in returns means more leads to deals.

* Homes.com focuses on utilizing our knowledge and expertise with SEM and SEO to maximize full potential in exposing you to your target area search on the front page of Google. If you were to use Google on your own, there is no support or monitoring for that Google provides and your budget can go to waste if not monitored carefully.

* I provide you your own account manager that keeps track of your listing and determines the best way to use your budget to maximize full potential. Let us do all the leg work , we invest our time so you can take care of what's important, your business..

* Very Affordable because this is based on your marketing budget customized to your pay plan.

* Included in your package is free lifetime Search Engine Optimization as long as your my client.

* Free unlimited listings to homes.com portal (Check out my company's website, its members only so that means it's not overloaded with free listings like realtor.com, which means less competition.

* Guaranteed results or you can cancel anytime if my service is not providing you with the results your looking for.

I want top producers who are serious in getting more exposure to their personal websites and getting more leads. Again this is exclusive marketing and I can register clients anywhere in the USA. If your target area is already filled, I will let you know when to check back or give you a call personally if my existing client doesn't renew. That's basically the reason my company limits 5 per market area because anymore it will not be effective.

David (David Gibbons (Zillow.com)

Thanks for the follow up on the "listings arbitrage strategy". Your suggestion to measure value of content for the consumer is well taken. We'll be looking more carefully at Zillow.com to see what makes the most sense. Much appreciated - Have a good day.

Craig@WilsonHOMETEAM.com

Rich J... either way Kennedy is still dead.... See I can be cheeky too :)

Dave ... I am not a techie ... don't know much about "javascript:noop();" ... or about SEO benefit from listings that are 301 ... and about AJAX ... and about listings partner to test .. and about URI to listings ... about a Roost with javascript. Why should I spend lots of time and learn this stuff? Harrison

I tried to find the no follow tag in the link and had no luck. Did a find search and still no luck. I think it'll be easier to download the Firefox software.

Thanks for the info.

Wow, it's been awhile since I've read this type of discussion on AR. I'm enjoying it enormously...the blog and the comments. I can certainly attest to the power of consistent blogging on a personal site when it comes to listings. We recently listed this home and were impressed with the results of the personal blog and other sites including our AR blog. Blogging works...big time! Our sign riders tell people to 'google our addresses.' And they do...It's remarkable & very powerful.

Snicker @ Homesdotcom using this post to advertise themselves.

Laurie -

Thanks (and no, of course not - I know that much about you.) By "social media" marketing I'm actually primarily referring to blogging. I think we lost each other in translation there a bit. What you're referring to is a subset of social media that I would typically call "social networks." Potato, Potaaato. I think it's very interesting how succesful people like Brad Coy use twitter or Tboard uses Flickr but those guys are the top .001% of this game. The rest really need to focus on making their blog work for them first.

It sounds like we also agree on advertising and I can actually offer you about 300,000 ad views a month in Long Beach ZIPs via Showcase ads. Our two most popular Long Beach Zips are 90803 and 90808 with almost 30,000 PV's each per month - to appear on every page where people are searching for homes in those Zip codes will cost $836.00 (or you could buy 25%, 50% or 75% of those impressions.)

Bill -

Don't get hung up on toolbar pagerank - it's not real - I used Greg's profile as an example of great use of external links, not authority but Greg has mentioned that his profile links have worked for him and he should know. Remember that page rank changes constantly and that pages' authority can increase rapidly thanks to upstream links. There are however users on Zillow with PR2, 3 and 4 profiles with much of that authority earned through contributions via the mechanisms I described above. Onsite links are a big part of how my profile earned a PR4 but I'm not nearly as active as some of our users so in my case it's a mix of internal and external links (folks in this industry will often link to my Zillow profile when they mention me.)

Thanks for mentioning that it was the wiki page that you were upset about. Me too. Boy were those pages abused. Common areas unfortunately attract a whole different type of challenge for community moderators. Not only do you have a constant challenge with spam links but competing profesionals were manipulating each others contributions to the wiki page. Honestly, nofollows on the wiki was a sadly essential move for us just like nofollows are for wikipedia.We do however have an much better solution in the works for showcasing local pros.

Jermaine from Homes.com. You just totally don't get it. ROFLMAO @ you and your tacky tacky tacky display of blogging rudeness. Don't you know it's totally ignorant and rude to advertise yourself in someone's blog contents?

David,

Thanks for the clear explanation. Very useful. I'll keep this and look at my listing links for sure.

I consider this post to be in the vein of a public service and really appreciate the sharing of information provided by this Zillow authoritarian.

Jermaine -

Dude, that is total SPAM but I'm not deleting it 'coz I obviously have a bias here. You got some good feedback from Karen there - I suggest you take note. What would be useful though is if you could let us know why Homes.com is using 302 redirects on links to agents' websites? Why shouldn't agents get any SEO benefit from syndicating their listings to Homes.com?

Now you know why I was snickering, ROFLMAO...

David, you are getting 300,000 views per month from just 2 zip codes in Long Beach? Zillow is at about 3,000.000 hits nationwide if I am not mistaken, are you saying that a clear 10% of your nationwide traffic is coming from 2 zip codes in Long Beach? If not, please clarify.

I did warn you about Math, right?

Oh, I would also like to know how you are acquiring those 300,000 hits in those 2 zip codes in Long Beach with no visible presence on the search engines. Thanks.

David, I had no clue about any of this!! Thanks so much for this helpful post!

Laurie -

We have 300K page views a month in all Long beach ZIPs combined. 90803 and 90808 are the two biggest Long Beach ZIPs with a sum total of almost 60K page views a month. Our site is much, much, much larger than you're thinking it is - we had 11,2 million visits from 5,4 million people in August with each visit accounting for multiple page views. Nothing wrong with my math (my first business was giving private math lessons.)

Laurie -

"Oh, I would also like to know how you are acquiring those 300,000 hits in those 2 zip codes in Long Beach"

300K was for all Long Beach ZIPs but the 60K in those two is nothing to be sneezed at. The one word answer to your question, Laurie is ... branding. If you combine the frequency of web searches for "Zillow" and "Zillow.com", Zillow is the second biggest brand in online real estate with only "realtor.com" being searched for more often than Zillow is.

SEO is not the only game in marketing. And trust me, SEO driven traffic is a lot less valuable on a visit-by-visit basis than branded traffic is (which is partly why clicks from Zillow convert so much better than those from predominantly SEO-driven sites) but there certainly is some gold in them thar SEO hills so look out for me in the SERPs. Where does the brand strength come from? Remember that Zillow isn't a listings arbitrage player - we publish proprietary content that has a significant following amongst RE consumers.

PS - we don't "acquire" traffic at least not in the "purchase" sense of the word.

I have to echo Brad's comment "But then again, if sites like Trulia and Zillow are a great resource, then agents can still benifit from them. Not for the link juice, but simply the exposure and "eyeballs" for their listings."

David~ OK I am totally confused about all of this now..... thanks alot..... Vickie

WOW - great post and comments. My first thought is that I showcase on Realtor.com and have struggled about keeping it. It is up for renewal in the next couple of months and may give it up. Regardless, I will mention the "nofollow tags" and one of the reasons. The other thing I appreciated was the example of the links in the profile page for BloodhoundRealty. I am always looking for ways to improve the writing and linking of my sites. However I could easily spend so much time on all this that I lose site of the fact that I am about selling Real estate and not creating websites. It all gets overwhelming - I need to keep a balance.

Earlier today Jermaine left an identical comment on a post I wrote a long time ago on which is the best website to use. I deleted it and posted that I cancelled Homes.com as I was not getting any juice.

Thanks for the posting. My site hits have dipped and I'm searching for why. Maybe it is because I have stopped using one online flyer in exchange for another one that has more free flyers. I'm not mentioning which ones because I haven;t looked yet to see if it matters, but will be interesting to find out. Of course I realize that the no follow link will come from the site the flyer gets posted on. I wonder if one flyer makes a difference than another.

peace,

Mary Ann

One more thing I forgot to mention - I am confused about multiple postings of my listings to several sites. I post them on Point2 which sends them to Zillow and Trulia etc. I also post them on my individual site that sends them to Trulia as well. I also use Postlets or Vflyers which also link to much of the same sites. I use HTML code to post the same flyer to Craigslist. So, how is this hurting my SEO and should I stop most of these except just one. Hope this is clear.

Harrison K Long -

There are certainly other good ways to market your business but the attraction of learning about SEO is that it brings you FREE traffic. Maybe have your local internet-guy read this post when next you're working on your listings feeds and site etc.

Christine -

You'll find "rel=nofollow" in the web page's source code. To see that you must click on "view" and then "source" or "page source" in your browser menu. The plugin really is easier. :-)

wow, great information. I add something new to my SEO arsenal every week it seems. a couple of entertaining smack downs in the comments made for some fun reading too :) thanks

Dave I am not looking to argue but what are you talking about when you say "tool bar page rank is not real"? It sure looks real to me? I have been a user of Zillow for a long time, contribute a lot, and my page rank of my profile has not changed since the day I joined. From an SEO stand point, value is gained when you have links on pages that have rank.

In regards to the other pages being "no follow" due to abuse I don't ever remember them being "do follow". Again not trying to stir up a fight but agents can disrupt others work whether it is no follow or do follow...correct? I understand how spam can be an issue as well but there are preventative measures you could take to prevent that.

The real value for any agent that is looking to increase there position in the serps is to have inbound links that have authority in the search engines.

Give me 3 steps to take that will increase the page rank of my profile and I will be a believer...the ball is in your court:)

Thanks for the information. It was a little over my head and I didn't have the patience to read over 100 comments but I got the part that not all links are beneficial and it's a good thing that I post to Zillow.

Thanks for sharing this "techie" information with the folks whose Googlicious listings bring valuable traffic to 3rd party sites, who then turn around and charge them for featured listings and ads.

While the "no follow" may be an acceptable practice for other sites (wikipedia), it seems a bit shady to do it to real estate agents' listings. Why should their listings help the third party site rank ahead of them? I think Trulia (& others) should seriously rethink this practice-- if only to show some goodwill to the real estate agents who provide them the valuable content.

Thanks also for the plugin tip.

P.S. I think Galen Ward deserves some credit for letting this nasty cat out of the bag.

Yikes, I need some SEO Lessons!!

Dave - thanks for the post. I read the post plus all the comments and absorbed some of it.

I have noticed lately that when one of my AR posts comes up high in a search, I click on it and it goes to the Localism page, not my post. So if my post is no longer on the first Localism page, it doesn't get seen.

Does that mean I shouldn't be posting to Localism?

I am pretty confused here - will come back and start over after dinner. I am going to subscribe to your blog - I see you haven't posted much on AR lately - but hope to see more of you.

Bill -

You know me - I love and welcome the debate. Thank you for challenging me - this way we both learn.

The PR you see when using a PR plugin is called "toolbar page rank" (TBPR.) It's a very loose guide to the relative ranking of pages but it's only updated 4 times a year. For search results, google actually maintains a separate and live internal and obviously secretive page rank that can change from one day to the next and which probably has a lot more granularity than TBPR. With actual page authority changing constantly, the point is that on the day that your profile happens to get a powerful upstream link on the site (like mine did today on AR), you want it to have useful links on the profile page to capitalize on that attention.

Remember that the topic of my post is SEO benefit from listings but I did take a look at your profile on Zillow and I do have 3 suggestions. BTW, your profile's TBPR is 1, not zero and your profile page is already well optimized for the day that it gets a more powerful links on the site. Really, now what you want to do is increase the likelihood that a link to your profile is featured somewhere on the site and improve the contextual relevance of the content on it. 3 suggestions ...

Try changing your username to something you want to rank for and that's preferably repeated on your profile page or in your listings - your name, city, neighborhood, brokerage etc.
Discussions. Very active. Very well indexed. This guy's a PR3 and all he does is contribute to Discussions on Zillow (the home page of which is a PR0.) You don't have to spend the time Pasadenan does in the forum - just pick a few vibrant threads and offer a good piece of advice now and then.
OK ... not really SEO related but I see your profile has 1000+ views. Cool. With a few tweaks I think the about me content could do a better job of converting sellers in your area to clients. Basically move the bold content to the top and make the lead story more about what problems you solve for your clients. You'd benefit from a few strong calls to action. Video?

And a fourth tip ... do nothing but wait a few months. You have GREAT listing content on Zillow. Problem is - we could currently be doing better at getting it indexed (about half of it is.) I'm working on that as we speak type. Links back to your profile from your listings should be helping your profile much more (and soon will.) In the meantime, to speed this up, you could pop a link or two to this page. (I'll update this post with that link.) Thanks - these tips were a fun challenge especially 'coz you clearly know what you're doing in this area.

SEO is great, and if your main purpose is to get higher rankings on your site, then you can worry about who you syndicate to. If your main concern is to get your listings noticed, THEN IT DOESN"T MATTER if the sites you syndicate to have no-follow. Is it wrong of these companies to use our listings to build their own web SEO? No- they use us and we use them. Without all those free syndication sites, our listings would be noticed on MLS only because not many of us can afford paid advertising in this market. It is important to me to build my website ranking, but my main goal is to get my listings seen, and Point2 syndication has been my hero there, and Craigslist is a Realtor's best freind. Over 90% of the traffic to my site comes from link-backs from Craigslist. Those are hits that I never would have had without that syndication, so you'll hear no complaints from me.

Trish Sarfert, Broker

Paradise Home Realty of the Southeast, LLC

http://www.ShadyTreeHomes.com

Trish (and Debe) -

Point2 rocks - they syndicate listings to Zillow and they do a great job of it. Debe also mentioned that she uses Point2 so I took a look at the 25 listings sites that Point2 list as syndicating to and a full 13 of them seem to pass SEO benefit to listing agents and brokers. Some are really big sites and some really small.

Trust me, I'm the first to argue for partnering with the large real esate media sites - like Zillow - and for buying our ads (thanks Joe :-) But the main point here is that there really is no good reason for nofollow on links to your listings and you should seek out those sites that do offer links.

What to do about it? Depends how many listings you have and how much traffic the 3rd party site is. Your mileage will vary but there's something to be said for search engine traffic.

SEP

2008

David, you are the man! Thanks for taking the time to clarify these fine but important keys to link SEO.

This is great information! It's definitely something I'll keep around for reference in the future!

Jermaine - I want to say this as nice as possible. You do not look like the "good guy" when you promote your services in the comment of someone else's post. Especially a post that belongs to your competitor. You are actually harming homes.com and probably loosing sales this way. If you want to promote your product offerings you should create your own blog post.

Jermaine,

Further to what Misty said and beyond the fact that your advertising here is wholly inappropriate, your command of the English language and your Grammar is atrocious. If you are a marketing expert, as you claim, then you should understand the utmost importance of professional copy, which you have not accomplished here.

Perhaps you are just one of the many vendors who have such a low opinion of Realtors that you assume that your inept abilities are "good enough" for us.

You should know that Realtors have become very immune to the advances of inferior vendors promoting product that their own copy indicates their inability to deliver.

So, when Misty said to you that you are actually harming Homedotcom by posting here, she is quite correct. I would add that you actually made yourself look like a complete idiot.

"You can check for nofollow tags by clicking on View --> Source in your browser window to check your links."

Another great way to do this, if you use FireFox, is to "Highlight" the link, right click the highlighted area, and click "View Selection Source".

Then you don't have to search through the code :P

Thanks for filling us in on things that we would otherwise never know. The nofollow thing I had been wondering about and you've helped me understand. Thanks again. Mike C

OCT

2008

How come the link to my website in my property listing looks like this:

a onclick="trackPAL(this, 'OfferInfoLink', paltrack.bid, paltrack.zpid, paltrack.zuid)" href="http://www.zillow.com/trk/ClkTrk.htm?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wallenpaupacklakeproperty.com&tp=13448827&ts=2141519576&tt=2" target="_blank">
www.wallenpaupacklakeproperty.com
</a>

What is all that junk doing for my SEO?

Hi Karen,

Zillow employs two different mechanisms for tracking clicks. One for internal metrics and one for reporting to partners. That's the "junk" but it's not the bad-junk - it's not blocking search engines from finding your site. One of the mechanisms is a redirect which I explained above. If you put that long link into the redirect checker you'll see that it's a 301 redirect which is google friendly. The other mechanism, the "onclick" piece, is also correctly implimented such that google will follow the link - but its important to note that onclick can also be abused to prevent search engines from finding dynamic URLs.

Thanks for asking.

OCT

2008

Dave - just was taking a look at your post and noticed the link love. Much appreciated. I also notice my profile also has some page rank:)

OCT

2008

David....great information!!! I'm just learning about SEO. I'm getting great results when you search my name. 8 of the top 10 or 9 of the top 10. Now I need to learn how to get great results for my services (no one that doesn't know me will search my name). Thanks for the info!!! I'm going to dive into it!!

OCT

2008

David,

this is alot of infomation, but i have bookmarked it and think that this is great. You have helped me as to how linking works.

Mike

OCT

2008

Great Post, I may have to read it like 10 times before it sinks in but thank you!

Wow! Very informative

David,

I am a rookie when dealing with this stuff. I am going to try out some of your tips to see if I can figure it out...I am sure I will be back for advice as it is clear you are a pro!

Thanks for the tips. Look forward to learning more.

OCT

2008

David, I have read and reread your post and am trying to understand. I realize I am somewhat computer illiterate but have been stumbling my way through. I can't figure out how to check like you said on no follow tags "View --> Source in your browser window to check your links" How do I do this? Once I figure out how to check it, how do I fix it to make the links go to my site? I just want to keep moving my ranking up in google searches. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Amy

Awesome information. I just started using Firefox so your tips are very timely for that. I've got my work cut out for me on this.

PS. Why are you posting on active rain about zillow? I'm new to zillow, but have been using active rain for the past year. Thanks,

Never mind on that last question. Just looked at your profile...:)

OCT

2008

Very interesting. There is so much to learn here it is unbelievable.

NOV

2008

I am just beginning to learn about SEO and appreciate informed people like yourself posting blogs about the topic.

APR

Excuse me. Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too. I am from Azerbaijan and too poorly know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Find the cheapest airline fares for discount travel." THX 8-), Tessa.

What a bizarre spam message, Tessa. Have you gotten into the wine or something?

APR

Sure miss you posting here on AR David, hope all is well. :-))

@ Karen - lol~

MAY

Hi David! I am posting here to get a message to you that I know you'll see! Thank you so much for attending Charlotte's first REBarCamp and being such a wonderful guest! I loved having the honor or meeting you and look forward to seeing you around again!

Now, I also have a Zillow question for you! I was just adding new listings in a brand new development to the site. The street name (new) is JONES RIDGE DRIVE and the system (Zillow) keeps changing it back to Jones Street, probably because the system does not recognize the new street name. JONES RIDGE DRIVE IS an official name in the tax records and with the city of Charlotte (and in MLS). How do we get that changed? I don't know how to go about contacting anyone at Zillow other than you!!!

Have a wonderful Memorial Day!

Your bull-riding-friend,

Debe in Charlotte

;-)

AUG

Hi guys. Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent. I am from Serbia and now teach English, give true I wrote the following sentence: "Slideshow speed secs home gold suppliers buy sell trade shows my alibaba china export." Regards 8) Queena.

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