Here is the background …

www.zillowblog.com is Zillow’s corporate blog. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the blog has almost 2 million inbound links. Yes, 2 million – and remarkably, this is about 400K more inbound links than www.zillow.com has. Now you see where I’m going with this. If we move the blog, Zillow could benefit from the additional inbound links.

So … what’s the possible downside to making the move? There are three trade-offs (that I’ve thought of.) First, but not the most concerning, is that ZillowBlog is one of the top referrers of traffic to Zillow.com. Second, the blog gives us more first page search results for many of our branded keywords. And lastly, and most concerning, is the fact that Zillow Blog is a useful tool for strategically placing strong inbound links to Zillow.com content. With Zillow Blog we can easily improve the SEO of individual pages on Zillow.com and loosing this last capability is what has me most worried.

What would you do with Zillow Blog? Or … where do you host your corporate blog and why?

This is web 2.0 justice at its best. Although I suspect poor Faye of ignorance over immorality, it’s a good reminder that the power to publish comes with legal responsibility. Libel and Copyright violations are the most common mistakes that bloggers seem to make. Back in the early days of RE blogging, Zillow’s General Counsel, Liam Lavery, posted tips for bloggers looking to avoid both of these common legal pitfalls. In that post, Liam distinguishes between plagiarism and fair use:

Frequently, bloggers declare that the First Amendment permits them to use freely any content available for their Web sites. In fact, U.S. copyright law does provide some relief via the fair use doctrine. However, the fair use doctrine is subtle and easily misapplied. Section 107 of the Copyright Act lists four factors to be considered in determining whether a use made of a work in a particular case is fair:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
• The nature of the copyrighted work.
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

As you can see, I totally overdid it on the the contrast and saturation. And the video needs music or a voice-over but you get the idea. The sunset view over Elliot Bay from downtown Seattle is breathtaking and there’s always something happening on the bay and downtown.

Could this work for advertising listings? I think so. The way a great view changes throughout the day can be spectacular and it’s something a prospective buyer cannot fully appreciate even after visiting the house. If the home’s view accounts for a large chunk of its price tag, a time lapse movie may be the best way to show it off. I can imagine a looping video could be useful at an open house and it could be a deal clincher on bad weather days.

Once you know what you’re doing and have equipment and software that you trust, shooting a  time lapse movie is pretty easy; just set up the camera and leave it shooting. You can then create a movie with just a few clicks of a mouse. Here’s a list of the tools I used and what I’ve learned for next time.

1. Digital Camera – Nikon D70 with standard 50mmm lens. The camera’s battery died after about 6 hours but I suspect that I’ll be able to shoot 12+ hours with auto-focus turned off.
2. Laptop – PowerBook G4 – to control the camera and store the photos. With a laptop for storage, you don’t need to worry about exceeding memory card storage limits – about 5 GBs of photos went into that short video.
3. Camera control software – Nikon Capture – I hope to find a better alternative before the trial runs out on the Nikon software but it does what I need it to (i.e. it takes a photo every X seconds). For this movie, I shot a photo every 6 seconds but exported the movie at 15 fps (normally 24 fps.)
4. Time lapse video creation software – Bensoftware’s BTV PRO – it didn’t crash once despite moving large files around. If you’re using a mac, I can recommend BTV PRO and it seems to have a few other good reviews online.

Last tip: beware of shooting through windows. If you can, place the camera outside – shooting through glass can cause all sorts of unintended side-effects. If you have no choice, place the camera as close to the glass as possible, disable auto-focus and ensure that there aren’t any lights immediately inside or outside the room that you’re shooting from.

Update (9/29): I’ve fixed the contrast by exporting the movie again. This really is easy once you get the hang of the software settings. So the movie looks a lot better raw I also uploaded it to Viddler this time and switched to the Viddler player you now see above. I think Viddler does much better justice to a movie like this and it would now make a great feature on a single property website. Anyhooo – here’s the original from YouTube if you’re interested in checking out my first attempt (Youtube is much easier on memory though so the Youtube embed seems to play the movie much smoother – at least on my computer.)

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.

There’s more discussion over at my post on Active Rain.

Gary publishes WineLibraryTV, Monday to Friday, to an audience of more than 80,000 people and he’s rather convincing when he says that you could do it too! And before you start with “… but Real Estate is LOCAL”, Gary reminded us that so is the retail wine trade. His family’s store is licensed in NJ and couldn’t sell us a bottle of wine yet Gary’s in Seattle on tour to promote his newly published book (101 wines) and I get the feeling that he’s just getting started expanding his brand. Most of all though, Gary’s an incredibly nice guy – and his advice was personally motivating. Thank you, Gary!

And many thanks to Steve and Rodney from Reachd for putting together today’s training and celebrity appearance at Zillow. Rodney Bartlett demystified video-blogging and Steve Jagger put a Flip camera in each of our hands. Now, there’s really no excuse, for me, or for Ardell Della Loggia, not to start publishing some web video. If you’re thinking about getting into web video and looking for inspiration, check out the filming-while-driving antics of BC real estate agent and course attendee today, Ian Watt. Ian’s most popular and controversial post to date is pasted below: Handing out keys to strangers, why would I do that?

A few footnotes on WineLibraryTV:

- WineLibraryTV isn’t edited (for the most part.) Gary works with a camera-man to produce, publish and distribute WineLibraryTV shows but he puts most of his personal effort into social media marketing.

- Gary recommends insists on using Tubemogul for distributing your videos to multiple sites.

- WineLibraryTV took a bet on the (then lesser-known) video player, viddler. Now, Gary consults to the startup and has equity in it. Reminds me of something Lockhart Steele said; “blogging is a great way to make things happen indirectly.”

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Hat tip: Missy Caulk

Here’s the line-up: (there may be last minute additions to this list, so swing by and check in with Damon for updates at booth #3444.)

Format: Limited Seating available. 45 minute sessions.

What: Incredible Agent introduces attendees to real estate bloggers at their exhibit.

Where: IncredibleAgent.Com Booth #3444 NAR Expo, Sands Convention Center Las Vegas

When: Wed 11 / 13 and Thursday 11 / 14

Schedule For Wednesday:

10:00 A.M. Damon Pace – IncredibleAgent Blog

11:00 A.M. Michael Price – MLBroadcast Blog, Mike’s Corner Web 2.0 For Realtors

12:00 P.M. Jay Thompson – The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

2:00 P.M. Joel Burslem – The Future of Real Estate Marketing (Inman News)

4:00 P.M. Pat Kitano – Transparent Real Estate

5:00 P.M. Kevin Boer – 3 Oceans Real Estate

Schedule For Thursday

11:00 A.M. David Gibbons – ZillowBlog

12:00 P.M. Kristal Kraft – Denver Real Estate Blog

1:00 P.M. Roberta Murpy – Luxury Home Digest

2:00 P.M. Jim Duncan – Real Central VA

3:00 P.M. Diane Cohn – Diane Cohn – Reno/Sparks Real Estate Blog

6:00 P.M. Nicole Nicolay – My Tech Opinion