Realtor Websites - Real Web Results Blog

Ever since Google’s big shakeup update last November - dubbed the “Florida” Update - it has been extremely hard for individual Realtor sites in most market areas to rank highly in Google for competitive keywords. This is not isolated to Realtor sites but is a phenomenon that applies to all commercial sites in all industries.

For Realtor sites it does not apply in all market areas either. Google has a list and some market areas are not on it usually because they are very small and managed to stay off the radar. The sites that replaced the missing websites were sites deemed to be “authority” sites or directories for the most part. Continue Reading »

2 Comments »

I can’t believe how many requests I get for link exchanges that are rejected because they are of no benefit. I bet I reject 80% of requests and you probably should be doing the same. If you are wondering why your search engine positions suck - you should pay more attention to this issue as outlined in this posting at agentsonline.net

When someone contacts you regarding a link exchange you need to:
a) Make sure their links page is actually listed in Google
b) Make Sure the links themselves are indexable - i.e. not in script but plain html.

Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

2 Comments »

Am I the only one waiting with nervous anticipation for Google’s annual fall shakeup? Remember the one last November that was dubbed the “Florida” update? Whoo Boy! That was a doozie!

Apparently Google reps have said that future shakeups will not be as dramatic as “Florida” - I don’t know whether that is good or bad. With Google’s current situation maybe this year will be the first year without a major fall shakeup.

Google must be as happy as a clam as their Adwords revenue is producing record profits and a skyrocketing share price. Since they stopped ranking newer sites for competitive keyword searches the only alternative for some is to purchase Adwords. Where is Google’s incentive to fix their index?

Gee, I wonder if it is just a coincidence that having an old stale index that doesn’t rank new sites also happens to increase revenue?

A few years ago when Inktomi was king they broke their index and then charged for the fix - paid inclusion. They had good revenues as result too until searchers noticed that their results were no longer relevant and left in droves to the new kid on the block - Google. Now Google is following the same path as far as I can see.

That leaves a great opportunity for MSN’s new search engine!

No Comments yet »