Realtor Websites – Real Web Results Blog

Lately internet forums that discuss real estate and SEO issues have been buzzing about Yahoo and the across-the-board penalty doled out to two of the most popular template sites used by Realtors. These penalties actually happened a few months back but I guess many agents were just waking up to the fact that their presence in Yahoo had disappeared.

This should have come as no surprise as Yahoo has been penalizing template site companies and all of their sites for many years now – ever since template sites for Realtors first began. Those of us that were aware of the issue have been expecting these latest penalties for quite some time now. I wrote about this issue a few times over the years in posts at the Agents Online Real Estate Idea Center… -back in June 2003 I wrote “Something most Realtors are not aware of is that many popular web site providers have set up hidden “link farms” in an attempt to improve the rankings of their search-engine-unfriendly sites and in these cases almost ALL of their web sites end up being penalized. The list of the guilty include some of the biggest and most popular website providers who shall remain nameless…”

In October 2005 I wrote specifically regarding Yahoo and template sites – “a similar fate has happened to other template site providers in the past. It goes something like this…

The template site provider gets the idea to link their Realtor’s sites together to improve search rankings. It works! Their sites move up and in some areas dominate the top results in Yahoo. After a year or so Yahoo notices this – probably from complaints from the public who do not think 8 out of the top 10 results from the same website provider is a good idea(they all look the same to a searcher). Since large template providers have thousands of sites this is a big problem for Yahoo. They take action and the sites no longer rank well.

It has happened to all other template providers that linked their sites together in the past. I am sure the company thinks their way of doing it (non reciprocal or 3 way links) escapes detection by spiders but the way the penalty has been applied in the past leads me to believe that the penalty is manually applied. Sometime too much success is a bad thing….”

One thing I found interesting is that although the penalties are applied to all websites using the guilty provider’s services, in the past that penalty would still apply to the domain long after the agent had moved the domain and created a new site. I have had clients who had domains hosted by penalized template site providers and it was still impossible to get good rankings for the domain years after it had been moved. The only solution was to use a new domain. This might not be the case if the current penalized companies are able to successfully negotiate reinstatement but if they can’t my previous experience suggests that the affected domains are probably now damaged goods.

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