Are your listings hurting or helping your Google ranking?
Syndicating listings to 3rd party websites should be part of your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. It’s a simple formula; you allow your listings to be published on other websites (comparison of who sends real estate listings to what portals) in exchange for a link back to your site. Link building, as the SEOs call it, is by far the most effective way to get good content to show up on Google’s first page and listings are a broker’s best option for link building. You may have heard it said that ‘content is king’ of SEO but links are queen. If two sites have similar content, the one with the most links typically wins.
The twist in this tail is that sending your listings to most 3rd party real estate listings sites is not helping your site’s SEO and may well be hurting it. Many listings sites employ technologies to ensure that your site is invisible to Google. There are a lot of sneaky tricks to this but to keep it simple, there’s one main things that you should be checking your links for – and that is nofollow tags.
Checking links for nofollow tags.
The oldest trick in the book is easy to spot. If a 3rd party site has added the tag “rel=nofollow” to your links then the search engines will not follow the link and will not find your site. For example, this link to my profile on Zillow is followed by google but this link is not yet they go to the same place. You can check for nofollow tags by clicking on View –> Source in your browser window to check your links. I personally prefer to use a firefox plugin that highlights nofollow links for me. You can get the plugin I’m using here – when it’s installed, right-click the “q” in your firefox tool tray and select “highlight nofollow links” and it will cause nofollow links to be highlighted in red. For example, Prudential Northwest and Mike Kass (pictured left) have invested in showcase ads on Realtor.com but they receive no SEO benefit from any of the links to their websites from those listings. Mike and Prudential Northwest will get more SEO benefit from this blog post than they do from syndicating their listings to Realtor.com. Note: when you dive into this, you are going to see a lot of red links and it’s important to remember that they are not all evil! There are some good reasons for using nofollow and google has clear guidelines that explain how nofollow should be used. All you need to know is that none of the good reasons for using nofollow apply to links on syndicated listings and honestly, it’s surprising that this hostile behavior is the norm in our industry.
Nofollow is the most common mechanism used to ensure that listings partners don’t get SEO benefit from the links on their listings but there are two other technical issues related to this problem that I’ll touch on very briefly here …
Checking links for 301 redirects.
It’s quite common that websites move their pages around. When they do that, and to ensure that old links still work, the old URLs are redirected to their new location. Redirects are how you sometimes end up on a web site that’s different to the link you thought that you clicked on and are quite commonly used by real estate sites to send click traffic through an intermediary server for counting purposes (Zillow does this).
Redirects will only be followed by search engines if they are of a specific type; namely a 301 redirect. Redirected links come in many flavors but all you need to look for is the 301 – links to pages with other types of redirects may as well have a nofollow tag because search engines will ignore them. Checking for 301 redirects is as easy as entering the listing’s link into a form and reading the results. There are numerous free redirect checkers online – I’m currently using this one.
Beware of Java Script
If the link to your listing from a 3rd party website looks something like this: “javascript:noop();” you are probably not getting any SEO benefit from it. Search engines can’t read the dynamic content that javascript delivers (which is why AJAX has lost some of its lustre.) I should add that there’s currently some debate about whether google is learning to read javascript but from what I’ve seen, it’s not happening much and it should be simple for you and your listings partner to test – just check whether a unique URI to one of your your listings gets indexed by Google (i.e. search for it) after it’s syndicated to a site (like Roost) that uses javascript.
Now, go and check on your listings!
Full disclosure: I work at Zillow.com. Listings posted to Zillow earn SEO benefit for your web site but don’t just take my word for it, go and test the links to your listings on Zillow.com for nofollows, javascript and 301 redirects. And then go and check the links from your listings on other sites and let me know what you find – you may be surprised.
Jamie
Posted at 15:49h, 24 SeptemberSearch engines do often follow nofollow links, but the links don’t ‘count’ – ie the link doesn’t add to the search engine’s tally. The links may still appear in search results.
The google policy you link to mentions that nofollow links should be used for untrusted content. Does that mean you trust that all listings on zillow are real?
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Posted at 16:11h, 24 September[…] Update: Post by David on Geek Estate Blog – Are your listings hurting or helping your Google ranking? […]
David G from Zillow.com
Posted at 16:12h, 24 SeptemberJamie –
That’s not true. If the link has a nofollow, google will not add the page to their index let alone assign it page rank. If you read the google guidelines, they quite clearly state that nofollow was developed to solve the problem of “preventing robots from following individual links on a page.” Who told you that?
Yes, we trust the agents and brokers that post their listings on Zillow by default. Our take on this is that real estate professionals should be given a professional-level of respect. A professional who chooses to use our site to advertise their listings deserves full attribution for that contribution. For the same reason we show the listing agent’s name on the listing, we also don’t mess with their links.
But you know what they say; “trust but verify” – obviously we’re aware of the potential for abuse. In other areas of the site where anonymous casual users are allowed to post discussions etc., we obviously apply nofollows to links but we view our relationship with brokers and agents as a partnership. As I said, there are many good places to use nofollow – links to brokers’ listings is just not one of them.
Jamie
Posted at 17:52h, 24 SeptemberDavid, I haven’t verified it, but my information on nofollows is from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow see the “Introduction and Support” section. It sounds like spiders follow the links but don’t attach any weight to them.
That makes sense to trust the links if they are verified real estate agents, but how can that be verified? And how do you know that ads coming from something like Postlets.com don’t contain spam?
David G from Zillow.com
Posted at 20:50h, 24 SeptemberJamie –
Got it, thanks. When I say “followed” I am definitely referring to whether google indexes the linked page. While trying to optimize a site’s SEO, getting indexed and gaining authority is all that matters when determining whether a listing partner’s site is SEO-friend or SEO-foe.
I had not heard that they may not index the page or rank it yet still go on to find (and follow) links there. Interesting if it’s true but even according to that wiki article, that theory is contra google’s official statement on this. As you probably know, there’s a fair amount of mistique and voodoo (and BS) in SEO. From what I’ve seen, however, nofollow is such a scarily effective strategy for outranking an original data source but I’d bet that simple internal linking on the target sites would probably have made that impossible if the theory were true. Maybe the folks at google will pop in here and let us know one way or the other … 😉
Daniel Bates
Posted at 03:25h, 25 SeptemberSince that red font can make your eyes cross and view source takes a minute too, I prefer to right click the questionable link and select “properties” (With Firefox). A box will pop up that says “relation: nofollow” if it’s not spreading the love.
Hawaii real estate guy
Posted at 11:23h, 25 SeptemberFrom what I understand, Google will actually follow the link but will not pass juice (PR). They will index a page that has a link to it with a no-follow. There may be other links to it that do not have the no-follow attribute. If someone does not want a page indexed that would be accomplished by adding a no-index attribute in the header or a disallow in their robots.txt.
I do think it is unfair to the agents and companies if sites like Realtor.com and Trulia are not linking to them unless it has a condom on it. They are using their content and then telling Google they do not trust this site. What’s up with that?
Randi Thornton
Posted at 06:02h, 26 SeptemberThank you for the great article!
I am looking in the Source Section and I do not see where the no follow tag is? Please advise. I want to learn to spot this.
Victoria
Posted at 17:00h, 28 SeptemberHi David,
Thank you for your post. I am a Marketing Coordinator for a RE Agent and after reading your blog, I checked the source code on several large 3rd party listings sites and have found “no follow” tags on all of our links. My question for you is what would be the appropriate action to take in order to have the tags removed from the code? Who would I need to address this issue to and do you have any advice for myself and other victims of the “No Follow” tags?
Riverside
Posted at 12:52h, 29 SeptemberDavid, Thanks for broaching this topic for the RE Sphere, I think it’s very important for Realtors to know a bit about the no-follow tag.
I agree with Hawaii real estate guy “Google will actually follow the link but will not pass juice (PR). They will index a page that has a link to it with a no-follow.”
I have been working in the RE sphere for the past couple of years, and quite often I get links that are “no-followed”, but I actually don’t mind. The reason for this is because I have my own personal examples of no-follow links being “attributed”
to my site (Meaning that when I log into Google Webmaster tools, go to the link section it actually counts no-followed links in that number). I do agree that it will not pass the page rank value of the page, but you forgot a KEY element!
ANCHOR TEXT!
You’re link may be no followed, but if your anchor text on your link is relevant to your keyword, that is picked up by Google. While Google may not pass page rank, it will understand the content of the page, the context of the link and the anchor text used.
DebOnTheWeb (AKA Deb Agliano)
Posted at 15:14h, 29 DecemberThanks for helping me to understand how nofollow links affect SEO – much appreciated!
Justin - Hawaii Life Real Estate Services
Posted at 15:24h, 14 AprilNote: I was formerly “Hawaii Real Estate Guy” but my competitor used that in this post, so I’m changing my name to my company’s full legal name (which my broker informed me is a requirement anyway).
Page Rank is not as important as it once was, and there are many other factors that pass through a link including trust and (as “Riverside” mentioned) anchor text.
Also, syndicating your listings does not always require a link back to your site and even a mention of your name. I know the MLS company for Kauai and the Big Island of Hawaii don’t require any reference to who the listing agent is while Oahu and Maui require mention of the listing broker’s name.
Jim
Posted at 16:51h, 17 AprilI beleive most IDX rules require the name of the Listing Brokers company not an actual link.