Comments on: Realestate.com.au Slip in the Google Rankings

By: HenryOctopus

HenryOctopus — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:18:47 +0000

To put another perspective on this, try USING the REA site now.
The new site is just atrocious, pretty close to utterly unusable.
I cannot comprehend who it is that companies think that a dominant position in the market means they can compromise on usability.

By: Glenn Batten

Glenn Batten — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:22:03 +0000

Wayno..

Read this article from last October that should answer your questions.
http://www.business2.com.au/2009/10/how-to-improve-your-results-on-google-real-estate/

In a nutshell Homehound is uploading your listings on to Google Real Estate too because you have not asked them to stop. Homehound do not know that you upload your own listings that has listings back to your own website.

By: wayno

wayno — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:14:20 +0000

Hi Glenn, can you tell me as to why this happened. I searched google real estate for one of my listings suburbs and found one and it had a link straight to my web site Searched another listing suburb and found one of my listings (different one) and it had a link to Homehound. why is this so ?

By: John

John — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:57:54 +0000

What you should find interesting is http://www.nestoria.com.au/help/about
Which has a working in partnership with Classified Ad Ventures
So http://classifiedadventures.com is run by Simon Baker (the former CEO and Managing Director of the Australian listed online real estate company

By: PaulD

PaulD — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:43:26 +0000

I notice Nestoria http://www.nestoria.com.au have slipped quietly in and seem to be getting amongst it. Domain features heavily along with Agent websites etc, however REA is nowhere to be seen. Could it be that there is still a bit of animosity between S.Baker and REA ?? and what will that do to the REA rankings ??

By: Glenn Batten

Glenn Batten — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:29:47 +0000

Blogs are always indexed very quick.

The quickest I have seen on any site was just 6 mins.. That was a popular US blog site who made a big deal of it at the time but I cant recall who it was.

The quickest I have seen a site I have had anything to do with was a little over an hour and it was this website. I was not actively looking for it.. just happen to do a search and new article came up. I had not read it and thought it was in the archive so I clicked on it to find that it had only just been posted.

Regular pages of normal websites never seem to be updated as quick.. at least with my experience.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:50:40 +0000

Yes I’ve seen that happen for new pages on established sites too Nick and I agree with you – sitemaps … even for realtively small sites … are important.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:47:01 +0000

Stuart I’ve seen new pages appear in under 4 hours.
It happens for some websites but not others. Google Sitemaps are a must as well.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:25:17 +0000

Glenn I think Craig explains what I was alluding to fairly well but I think you may have identified the hidden cause why that may occur although there was a time a few years ago when you could almost guarantee that a new site design … even if you did use the same URLs … would take a hit in the rankings.

I guess I’m rather conservative in my dislike of dynamic urls and it will be interesting to see just what effect they will have on REA’s rankings when the new site appears.

Having said that I do know that Google seems to be making some amazing changes in the way it handles it’s listings.

On Monday we were approached by a local business that had been ranking well for some very competitive terms but they had crashed out of the rankings thanks to a terrible blunder made by the web designer who was handling their business.

We suggested a minor change that involved a few lines of code in their htaccess file and the business reported that 12 hours later their phones started ringing again.

I had told him to expect no change in their rankings for at least a week.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:08:14 +0000

Glenn you’ll notice that ads on RealEstate.com.au have evaporated as well.
They havent stopped using Adwords. They have just paused their campaigns for the moment and are waiting for the new site.

Aryan, neither of them stopped because of Google Maps Real Estate.
Their ads are plastered all over Google Maps to try and lure people away.

Its too soon to speculate about the Caffeine results.
Not only is Caffeine under construction still, but so is REA.
We need to wait a couple of months to see if the new results will stick.