Trulia Widgets. Are they stealing your Google juice?

Thanks for the heads up on that.

Geez. this is the blind leading the blind and yelling "Fire!" at the same time.

Hi fellow Rainers!

For some clarity on much of the misinformation and confusion going on here and elsewhere, please take the time to read our blog post - http://www.truliablog.com/2008/05/15/back-to-basics-trulia-was-built-to-help-improve-your-ro

Thank you

Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia.com

My pleasure Bryant!

Rudy

Here is a question I asked on the HomeGain blog recently- How does a third party PARTNER with Realtors? http://blog.homegain.com/how-does-third-party-vendor-partner-with-realtors

I have just started following this drama and while I understand that you would not want to send visitors or Google juice to Trulia I think that this is being blown way out of proportion. I have been involved in SEO for nearly 10 years so I know a bit about the industry. Those widget links are beneficial to Trulia, no doubt. They are using hypertargted anchor text and they provide quite a few links. If I were to use the widgets (any widget) I would simply remove the links. I think widgets can provide useful information and a good user experience as long as you keep the user on your site. If you provide an experience that they enjoy they are more likely to stick around and come back. Nothing wrong with that.

And there is nothing wrong with Trulia providing widgets and of course including a link back to their site. This is standard protocal for all widgets. It helps with SEO and it helps bring more visitors. Nothing at all evil or shady about it. And if you think that if every realtor removes the Widgets from their site is somehow going to kill Trulia's SERPS you are sorely mistaken. Halfdeck, who is a pretty well respected SEO, wrote a good article about this here. Trulia has tons and tons of page rank passing links from highly trusted sources and like Misty said, they have all the on-site SEO factors in place that allow them to benefit from those links. As long as sites like CNN, Businessweek, and other trusted web sites link to them and they continue to add relevant content to their site, which has strong technical SEO techniques in place, they will continue to rank very well.

I agree that you are not helping yourselves by keeping the links in the widgets but I think that the overall affect is being overstated. I also think that utilizing some widgets while keeping users on your site can be beneficial in making your site a useful resource, which will keep users coming back and compell others to link to you.

BT, alot of this is over my head as well.  I think you have the right idea, when in doubt, just pass. I luckily never got so far as adding widgets except on my #1 site, and they interestingly enough, seem to have been removed without me asking.

LOVE the debate!  Mark Pilatowski-for those of us not so html savy, how do you disable those links.  I just added one of the Google widgets to my site and was trying to figure out how to eliminate the hyperlinks.  It was not clear which part of the code pertained to them.

Not to side track the thread, but I'd like to know how to disable them as well.  Also, does puting listings on Trulia take away as well or is it jus the widgets?  Still learning...

I personally do not believe in the theorie of stealing Google juice. I believe it actually helps to link to sites like Trulia. The question is if their fame is deserved or not, when they really do use a system that makes real estate webmasters work for them without really benefitting all that much. I like their site, their blog and team looks cool, but the question is whether or not Google is doing a great service by rewarding those who figure new ways to convince webmasters to advertise their websites for free.

Bryant - great information, and debate here. In my area, the ranking changes almost daily. Good to know about the widgets.

Hi Bryant ,your blog is good!

anyone know how to extract data from a web database. For example, how can I extract movie information from http://www.imdb.com/ into a relational database? Is there any existing tools to do this? Or need I write some codes?
Thanks a lot!

There is a Screen Scraping service, visit www.knowlesys.com for more details.

Someone said a few exits back in the comments that wonder if  there is a study if you have dial up vs high speed if you tend to dig deeper than first 10 on page one?  I know kids who spend a considerable amount of time wheelin' around the net avoid the top sponsored search results. My son told me "Dad...they usually have nothing in there and paid to be there"..so they check what organically climbed to the top as most creditable and worth their eye ball scan. I know I don't limit it to page one...and in the case of saving money on something or knowing more, digging deeper is part of the discovery.  There may also be a better site a ways back that is new and climbing but not up to the first page plateau yet. Enjoyed Misty's contributions here at AR University.

Very interesting, I have been weary of these widgets for quite some time....I did not really have a reason, but I am glad I have not littered them onto my sites.

I can see how this could happen.  I always utlized YouTube and Google Videos, if I am going to ad ANY technology.  They don't steal your SERP's and Google LOVES LOVES LOVES videos on blogs. However, I personally have used Trulia widgets and haven't lost any rankings or Google juice, perhaps because my link popularity is so high?

Chris Hallmark - http://www.freerealestatemarketinglab.com

Hi Bryant,

Good post. Excellent job. Very informative.

Best -Sash