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Active Rain’s Google Juice seems to be Declining

By
Commercial Real Estate Agent with RE/MAX West Realty Inc., Brokerage (Toronto)

Active Rain’s Google Juice seems to be Declining

Ontario Real Estate Source

By Brian Madigan LL.B.

That’s what I had read here, but I really didn’t believe it.

However, let me tell you what happened in terms of my own research.

I decided to run for a Board position on the Real Estate Council of Ontario. That is the regulating body for real estate professionals in Ontario. It usually goes by the acronym “RECO”

So, I was looking for “RECO Election 2012” as search terms. I wrote several blogs about it, and published my platform. There were 8 blogs on the topic. Some of my AR blogs were subsequently published on some of my other blogs, but not all eight. The search words , keywords, and tagged words remained the same for all blogs.

First to the good news. I have 16 of the first 20 (10 per page) positions on Google.

Naturally, I expected my Active Rain posts to rank first and be the most highly visible blogs on this subject.

Here are the actual results:

1 wordpress (me)

2 wordpress (me)

3 wordpress (me)

4 wordpress (me)

5 reco (the regulator, who should be first)

6 zimbio (me)

7 zimbio (me)

8 active rain (me)

9 lawblogs (my blog but republished by third party)

10 blogspot (me)

Page Two

11 blogspot (me)

12 zimbio (me)

13 zimbio (me)

14 twitter (me)

15 not relevant

16 not relevant

17 RECO (regulator)

18 wannanetwork (me)

19 blogspot (me)

20 ushomes (my blog but republished by third party)

So, my question is what happened to all my AR posts? They were all on AR, yet there was only one which made it through.

Needless to say, I am rather disappointed with these results. Clearly, I would have to favour my Wordpress Blog, or my Blogger Blog which ranked well for just a couple of posts or even zimbio which is simply a feed from my wordpress blog.

 

Brian Madigan LL.B., Broker is an author and commentator on real estate matters, if you are interested in residential or commercial properties in Mississauga, Toronto or the GTA, you may contact him through RE/MAX West Realty Inc., Brokerage 416-745-2300.
www.OntarioRealEstateSource.com

Wallace S. Gibson, CPM
Gibson Management Group, Ltd. - Charlottesville, VA
LandlordWhisperer

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/seo/how-activerain-destroyed-their-search-engine-rankings-with-one-text-file/4752 

Brian * I asked AR about this in a comment on the Official AR blog and had the comment removed....something has happened and I hope it is fixed ASAP

Apr 14, 2012 06:44 AM
Ralph Janisch ABR CRS Broker
Janisch & Co. - Conroe, TX
Selling Northwest Houston to good people like you!

That is disappointing to hear.  AR declining just as we are getting into the swing of blogging.

Apr 14, 2012 07:38 AM
FN LN
Toronto, ON

Hi Brian - I read the post that Wallace linked to at ZDNet.com, which is a site owned by Ziff Davis, a major computer magazine publisher that has been around for several decades.  The Feb 25, 2012 article discussed that the Feb 9, 2012 robots.txt file had been replaced by a version that caused the Google spiders to NOT crawl ActiveRain.  I just checked the current robots.txt file at ActiveRain and it is back to the Feb 9, 2012 version.  Since Google had been told for a period of time not to crawl the ActiveRain site, it would likely take some time for it to come back.  We don't know how long the wrong version of the robots.txt file was online.

I also did a Google search on the same keywords you used and had similar results as you (I did not check the results with your post).

Apr 14, 2012 11:32 AM
Mark Loewenberg
KW of the Palm Beaches - Palm Beach Gardens, FL
KW 561-214-0370

I too have seen some slipping as well, frustrating as I use it as a listing tool for showing how I am better than the agent next door.

Apr 14, 2012 11:34 AM
Kathy Clulow
Uxbridge, ON
Trusted For Experience - Respected For Results

Brian - Barrie did some serious checking on this a while back and was not happy with what he saw in this regard but there are other aspects to it that he feels are still working in our favour. He also tells me that some of my posts are beggining to show up again in his google alerts quicker than they have been for a while now.

Just searched RECO Election 2012 and reco was #5 Your AR post #11

Apr 15, 2012 02:17 PM
Brian Madigan
RE/MAX West Realty Inc., Brokerage (Toronto) - Toronto, ON
LL.B., Broker

Yes, I noticed that the AR post slipped. I'm not happy about that because of all the time which we invest here.

I know both Barrie and Marc are quite up on all of this.

My research is just "anecdotal".

But, I would really like to see better results from AR.

 

Apr 15, 2012 09:54 PM