Real Estate SEO is decidedly one of the most challenging and difficult types of organic search results to obtain success in for real estate websites. The 800 pound reason for this challenge is replication– the high level of similarity between real estate websites in any market area. There are four primary areas where duplication hurts the effort of a real estate agent to rank above competitors in organic search results on Google.
1. Duplicate Content: the very nature of real estate creates a natural tendency toward duplicate content. If you are an agent in Anytown, You’re guaranteed to be in competition with other agents in Anytown too. Often, all of you are marketing the same properties on the same streets and other than the listing agent, you all have access to the exact same description via the MLS. The highlights of your town, things to do and things to see are the same for everyone. The history of your community is the same as well, and the temptation is to go to a Wikipedia article or Chamber of Commerce website and pull that information down onto your website or blog.
2. Duplicate product: as mentioned above, all agents have access to the same properties via the MLS. Some agents spend thousands of dollars to integrate the MLS into their website so that every listing becomes an indexable part of their website by the search engines. This generates hundreds or thousands of pages of the exact same content on every website that integrates the MLS. Unless you are the biggest baddest player in the ring, you’re not going to win this fight. If you go into SEO looking for a fight, SEO will give you one and you will lose.
You have to begin to find ways to present your product, even in a general sense that is unique and not duplicated from other sources. You may have to drive around town and take photographs of your own and create posts about those photographs and what your take is on the community. This can go a lot farther than simply wasting money on integrating MLS listings into your website. People wanted personal connection that gives them unique insight into a community, especially as they are from out of town.
3. Duplicate back-links: when an agent discovers SEO and the importance of back links they begin to go out and build or obtain those back links, and often they target a few or even just one keyword or phrase. They adopt that keyword as their primary anchor text. Things go well at 1st, and they see some improvements in their positions in Google search results, and then everything grinds to a halt or even worse, things go south and their website goes from page 1 or 2 to page 5 or 6 in a matter of days, with seemingly no rational explanation.
They have been building more and more back links, right? The problem with this kind of campaign is that the aggregation of back links becomes unnatural and a Google algorithm or filter detects this unusual pattern and devalues those back links until a more natural “back link profile” emerges.
How Hubpages Failed to Get This
CEO of Hubpages says SEO doesn’t work since Panda
In a recent interview, the CEO of Hubpages complained that SEO no longer works. The simple truth is that the website still remains a target for Panda because of its content. Watch this video to see why.
By SEO Expert Dave Keys | CEO Hubpages blames Panda for company’s woes: Visit http://real-estate-seo.net http://solutionsbydave.com The CEO of Hubpages stated in an interview with ZDNet that SEO doesn’t work. He had a litany of complaints ending with the summation that Google seems to want people to move their content to Google’s platform. Never mind that it took just seconds to find spammy duplicate content on the top tiers of the Hubpages website. It doesn’t take an SEO expert to know that duplicate content will get you slapped by Panda and your website penalized too.
4. Duplicate link sources: some agents find a few sources where they can easily create back links and they go to work creating the required content to place their links and perform this task over and over increasing the diversity of the anchor text and even linking to specific pages on their website, but Google’s algorithm sees this clearly as a one-dimensional attempt to leverage a website’s position. More sources of back links is required to rank better. This increases the difficulty of the back link task exponentially. Understandably, many agents just give up when they see no improvement.
A real estate SEO expert understands these pitfalls, knows how to avoid them, and knows how to launch and execute a link building campaign so that search engines are satisfied that every level of diversity in that campaign is satisfied. It is known that in 2011, Google has integrated many important factors in verifying the proper “back link profile” which includes social metrics, contextual relevance, and over 200 factors in the ranking algorithm. Real estate SEO, more than many other SEO campaigns must engage in greater diversity because of the competition and the similarity of other real estate websites.
