With Google, Yahoo and MSN looming large on the real estate classifieds market it is time for some less than creative thinking from the real estate portals. The gist? Sign up for a multi year subscription now and we will cut our annual price hike by such and such %. In the past these price hikes have been in the range of 7-9% (ouch) but with multi year deals you could get that down to 5 or maybe 6% (ouch again).

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Over the past few months we have seen a number of portals released. At my last count in my Firefox bookmarks there are now 26 real estate sites that would like to be known as National Portals. However I can only count three as true National Portals backed by companies that can get these portals to the masses and one of these - MyHome is only in the mix because of the backing of PBL and MSN, with MSN just playing a basic role.
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Here are some quick links to finding out the popularity of your website (and your competitors) in Google!

Link Popularity: Not all search engines report link popularity data consistently enough to be included in a meaningful benchmark. However, knowing what these other engines are reporting can be very helpful.

Type in: link:www.yourwebsite.com.au in Google , Yahoo and MSN

Search Engine Saturation: Search Engine Saturation tells you how many pages you have indexed in the search engines. If your site is built correctly, everey single listing should count as a page plus all of your other pages. So if you have 100 pages each of these should be indexed.

Type in: site:www.yourwebsite.com.au in Google , Yahoo (special link) and MSN

I have provided some links here for Agents to make sure they are registered in the most important search engines. There are only about 5 search engines that are really needed. The remaining search engines have fallen away over the last few years. The major one, a search engine that commands over 70% of the market is Google - and this is a must.
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