I had a feeling that the tight arse comment might get a reaction from somebody :) It was a little bit tongue in cheek however it does become somewhat frustrating when have seen the long-term benefits obtained from investing in your own Web site only to have business owners (not just real estate agents) not proceed due to pricing.

Glenn you are very much a rarity as a business owner with a good grasp on the optimisation process.

From an internet marketing perspective …. absolutely nothing…. The more pages in the index the more it will drive visitors to your site… but the reality of our industry is a different story.

From an agents perspective many buyers don’t take too kindly when they ring up on a property to find out that it was sold a week ago or the price had changed or it was withdrawn from sale. For some reason they can take it personally as though we go out of their way to waste their time. It may sound crazy but its a reality.

Real Estate agents are in the sales business. Suggesting alternative properties is a normal everyday practice. Its like trying to teach a cat to purr!! No successful agent would do otherwise.

Calling agents tight arses then commenting on how much we spend on property portals is a little contradictory dont you think.. On one hand we dont spend money, on the other we spend too much … Which is it?

Real Estate agents are instant hit junkies. We as an industry place an ad, and expect a result on that medium. Investing time in a strategy that will pay dividends later is a little foreign too many although the tide is changing. You can virtually guarantee that if you spend money this month on realestate.com.au you will get significant enquiries this month. When the day comes that the agent believes that this will happen with their SEO investment they will pay the money, no problem at all. Tight arses we are not… well most of us :)

And even if you really believe that, since your in the business of providing the very same service you posted on.. I would probably keep those thoughts to yourself in case somebody takes your well meaning comments the wrong way!!

If an agent is prepared to have stale data in Google’s index then trying to get those properties listed is certainly an option. The problem that I see is that street addresses are just not searched by the public very much and I cant see it bringing lots of traffic. The net reward for the effort is too low.

In my mind you are better to invest your time and money into creating 100 great content pages optimised for industry and geographic based keywords. That is what is being searched. The good news is that most agents don’t do it, so basic seo strategy can provide fantastic results because there is little competition.

If you want your listings removed quickly, just adding a meta tag telling the robot to remove it from the index is going to be way too slow. You have to wait till it visits that page next which could be weeks or months before it even knows to remove the page, then that can still take ages. You are better to use Google removal process in addition to meta tags which will accelerate the process however even that is still very slow.

Just out of interest what is an example of this quality software that you are suggesting an agent should invest in???

Without doubt your industry has benefited much more than most since the general public has embraced the Internet, but when it comes to investing in the vehicle that is essentially your new shopfront you are mostly a bunch of tight arses!

I just can’t believe that you all sit back and pay hundreds of dollars per month to a large portal, essentially paying them to take a stronger stranglehold and then not be prepared to adequately invest in your own Web site and its follow-up marketing.

Getting your listings in and out of Google is easy if you invest in quality software, backed up by a company that knows what they’re doing (there are plenty of them around). I’m also wondering what’s the big deal about having expired or under contract listings still in the search index? With a little bit of forward thinking and you could explain that the listing is no longer available but here are some alternative properties that you may be interested in, or low and behold subscribe to our property alert newsletter to be first to know of new properties.

Perhaps if you do want listings to be removed from Google you might want to add this particular Meta tag:

What – Simon has applied for his old job? :)

What REA do is far from unique as most of the portals and many of the real estate groups do the same thing. The differences are that REA do it better.

Beating REA begins with an appreciation of how much SEO can bring an agency both in additional enquiries from buyers and listers, and a perception of prestige by the public being higher than Google. That may sound funny but we have got listings because people said everytime we search for property in the area you guys come up.

I was thinking for a future article of shortlisting 10 or 15 individual agents who have outstanding traffic going to their websites and hitting them all with some questions…

If agents better understood what an increased web presence can do to their traffic which in turn can help their bottom line it might make a difference. No principal is going to spend a few thousand dollars on SEO if he does not even know what it means and how it could benefit them.

The easiest way is content… content is key… Create more content for your site.

Just one example out of many is the words “making an offer on a house”. We get over 15 visits per day every day (some as high as 35) on this keyword because we have a page on how to make an offer on a house. That is more than many real estate offices get to their whole site from all sources. The good news is that out of all of those visitors well over 40% of them went on to view more stuff on our site including property for sale. In fact the average pageviews for this keyword was still 5+ pages which is high considering that 50+% only viewed the single page and left.

Our content has got that big in some cases we are actually pulling whole sections out and putting them under their own domain name which in turn drives traffic back to the main site…

Some of the examples are http://www.nerangproperty.com and http://www.nerangcommunity.com

Sal, this is IMHO how we as agents claw back the market reach for real estate on the web. Better SEO on more content pages. Things like suburb directories, guides, property statistics etc etc. Google ranks on authority value… if your site is perceived to be an authority on a subject, you rank better.

But things may not be going all REA’s way with news about to break soon that should put a smile on a few dials.

I said how it would work for our site.. but I can’t ensure it will work on everyone’s site. I know how our site is structured etc etc but I have no idea about your site.

Getting everyone of your properties in Google’s index can be far more complicated but let me explain. I will give you some links to read that will give you the finer details.

You can block or allow Google or any other search engine from accessing any page or directory on your site through the Robots Exclusion Standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

You have not provided your website so I can only talk generally as though you had a site typical to most real estate agents in Australia.

Most real estate sites by default allow Google to index their properties as yours probably does already. What happens is that Google chooses not to index them for a number of reasons but the main one is because search engines dont like dynamic pages which most companies providing websites to agents use.

There are ways around it and that includes rewriting any dynamic url to be a static url using things called a url rewriting engine built into many webservers.

The problem is stuff like this does not make web companies money because it s not something you as a website owner can see and therefore that most of them can appreciate.

Read more about static url’s versus dyanmic urls here
http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php

Assuming you have a site that uses dynamic url’s as you will see when you read that article, Google thinks most of your properties are the same page which is why you are not indexed, not because you are being blocked.

If you change your site to either use static url’s or to use dynamic url’s that are search engine friendly then your properties MAY get indexed….

That is still up to Google and there are plenty of more criteria you need to follow far beyond a quick comment here..

Best you read Google’s own guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 as there is probably a good chance that you will need to change quite a few things to get your SEO working properly.

Using a sitemap (see point 3 under “your site is ready” section) will ensure that they can at least find every one of your pages.

Even if you follow everything so far and have a perfect site it does not mean you will get your properties indexed.. As I mentioned earlier Google probably does all it can to filter out these sort of listings. Could you imagine if every item on any classified site was indexed individually… property, cars, ebay auctions, etc etc

LJ Hooker try to get individual properties listed such as including things like http://www.ljhooker.com.au/3N2FDT in their sitemap file but I dont think you will be able to find that in the Google index.

Have a look at their sitemap file at http://www.ljhooker.com.au/sitemap.xml

Sorry.. but the 30 seconds work is ontop of a whole lot of other work… You cant just recreate the 30 seconds :)

If you want to get serious about your SEO… maybe speak to the guys at http://www.devnet.com.au .. They are Google Enterprise partners who have a specialist real estate division… The best place to start if you have not already is getting some sort of Analytics program to see what your site is doing right now but they can tell you all that… alternatively you are in for a bit of reading learning it all yourself… :)

RE: “This flick of the wrist you suggest would involve changing one line in our robots.txt file and Google would index every property. 30 seconds work. ”

What is the code we should insruct our tech people to use please?

We would like our online listings to have this functionality, despite the challenges you see with it. We would like to use any system if it means all of our properties can be seen by Google at no additional cost! (Especially as we head into ‘uncertain’ times in the market).

Thankyou in anticipation.

Bruce

I still think that if REA didn’t have a content agreement with Google, (do they still?), they would/should be black-listed for ‘Google-jamming’ (a new term you can use if you give me some copyright in your credits :) i.e. The REa Google results for 20 Atacama Way, Nerang, Qld, don’t provide results for a anything like 20 Atacama Way, Nerang, Qld! They are ‘jamming’ the highest search results and pissing everyone off – buyers, vendors and agents alike!
Ps Glenn, agents websites can only gain additional power through aggregation and Google Realestate isn’t the solution. I think we have to try as many options as possible hoping for one to magically ’stick’ it to the ‘bad guys’ :)