The seemingly obvious solution to getting lost in the Craig’s List real estate ad shuffle is posting your ads multiple times to the site. San Francisco has always been a bastion for left of center political thinking, and Craig’s List, having originated in San Francisco, has many democratic/socialist kinds of conventions in their rules and policies. In fact, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has told Wall Street “Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit”. Not being able to buy your ad premium placement (except in a few cases with job postings in major US cities) anywhere on all Craig’s List sites is one way this “equality for all” stance plays out.
Another way Craig’s List rules are informed by the “equality for all” ethos of leftist politics is their militant stance against posting your ads multiple times. The site has various measures in place that are quite effective at rooting out duplicate ads and over posting. Once you post an ad, you won’t be able to post that same ad again until it expires (the length an ad can run varies, depending on the section’s popularity). Even if you try posting the identical ad in a completely different city, the site will immediately recognize this and will block your attempt. It’s also no good trying to delete your ad and re-post it as the system will block these attempts too.
So you need to understand how Craig’s List examines ads and ferrets out duplicate content. One of the first things the site looks at is your ads’s title. The ad title is what’s seen in search results. So when you re-post an ad for the same listing, change the ad title’s wording up.
Another way they find duplicate ads is the back links you use in your ads. If you use an identical back link (eg. your listing link on your website) when trying to post a second ad for that listing, the system will recognize this and may block your ad post. So it’s a good idea to have separate strategies for posting your ads and back links. Your posting strategy should be having varied wording in both the title and body of your listings with only one of your ads for a listing having the full http://www.your-website.com/listingA.htm. However, if you leave out the http:// from re-postings of that ad but leave in the rest (eg. www.your-website.com/listingA.htm), the site will not recognize this as a link, and so they won’t connect it with previous posts.
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