Interview With a Search Expert — Greg Boser

How can your website succeed on the Internet? The answer to that question is unique content and unique inbound links, which we continue to talk about on a regular basis here at Advanced Access. A website needs greater substance in order to be competitive and generate leads.

The creation of unique content on your website is important for search engine placement and for keeping your visitors interested once they are on your site. You can make your website original and "sticky" with great information about your community, relocation, real estate in your area, and anything else that makes sense to you.

Unique inbound links from trusted industry and local community websites can establish your domain, in the eyes of the search engines, as a trusted and authoritative source of information. How can you find the best sites to associate yourself with? How will it affect your site by disassociating with bad neighborhoods?

Luckily we have some answers from the expert to these important questions.

Kristina Davis from Advanced Access recently sat down with WebGuerrilla, aka Greg Boser, to chat about ways real estate websites can succeed in the search engines. WebGuerrilla has been working with Advanced Access for the past year to provide assistance in working with Yahoo after many websites on the network were penalized in 2006. We've talked about that in previous Marketing Tips and in our private client forums; how Yahoo finds link spam and can penalize it manually. The penalty did not just affect Advanced Access sites, but other popular networks within the real estate website industry, whose client sites were also manually penalized in 2005. In our interview with Greg, we asked a few questions regarding important factors for your online success.

AA: What are the most important factors to succeed in Google?

GB: There are three main items that I'll cover. These three concepts come directly from Google patents and based on my personal experience, are all being used to some degree.

1. TrustRank - TrustRank involves humans creating a master seed list of sites considered to be trustworthy. Of course, no one actually knows what sites are on that list, but the general consensus is the top level would be governmental/educational type sites. Anything .gov, .edu, or .orgs are among these top level sites. Like PageRank, TrustRank has a trickle down effect, so the closer you are to the top level sites (in terms of linking structure) the better off you are.

2. Local Rank - Local Rank is all about analyzing the linking structures within a small subset of pages. (The top initial 1000 pages returned for a given query). The idea being that a link from a page that was also considered a potential match for the original query should be worth more than a similar link on an unrelated page. One important factor considered when analyzing links for a Local Rank score is the fact that an attempt is made to filter out or discount links coming from "the same host" or "similar or affiliated hosts" such as all sites hosted by Advanced Access. That would include things like site-wide links and multiple links coming from the same IP.

3. Historical Data - The age of your site and the history of linking patterns to your site have an impact as well. Historical data really creates two different sets of rules depending on the age of your site. A set of links pointing to an older website may have different values given to it by Google than the same set of links pointing to a new site. Google values websites that have been around longer than new ones just starting out.

AA: How can a real estate agent use these concepts to structure their Marketing Plan?

GB: Real estate agents need to focus on finding links that are tied to other trusted sites on the Internet. There are so many great existing linking opportunities that will dramatically boost both the TrustRank, as well as the Local Rank, for the average real estate website. A handful of quality links will do more than hundreds of poor quality PR0 links that many real estate agents have from past network linking. All you need to do is put in a little effort to get those quality links. You can find these types of sites by searching in Google for your main city name and looking for top ranked sites, buying advertising in online local newspaper sites, and finding sites that are linked in Wikipedia.org and other trusted directories such as Yahoo, Dmoz, and Best of the Web.

Related: Searching out Quality Link Resources from a past AA Marketing Tip.

AA: Many real estate agents are still linking to other agent sites around the country because of past advice from us and the continuing belief that those types of reciprocal links are keeping them high in the search engines; namely Google. We have been encouraging our clients to delete those types of links entirely but could you explain why search engines dislike them?

GB: To a search engine, a Realtor® in California linking to another Realtor in Maine is not in the interest of the consumer. A consumer searching for real estate in Santa Clarita, CA is looking for real estate in that community and not interested in finding a home in Maine. The debate over these links being for legitimate referral purposes for relocation is dead to the search engines; that battle is lost. The intent of these links was done for the purpose of gaming the search engines with artificial anchor text and a long list of links. If something is done with the intent to game the search engines it is usually against their quality guidelines.

While Yahoo has already taken dramatic action against network links of this type, Google has also made it clear that they are also not happy with this type of linking. I have had many personal conversations with employees at Google, most recently with Matt Cutts, who leads the Search Spam team, at the last London Search Engine Strategies conference in February 2007. We talked about the fact that Google is aware of these types of linking schemes and will be moving to clean it up sooner, rather than later. This will most likely be done with their algorithm so there will be no way for myself or Advanced Access to fight for a network issue with Google; this will be site by site - every person for themselves.

The web has evolved a great deal since the idea of a large, cross-linked, peer-to-peer network was invented. And the attitudes and opinions of those who run the search engines have evolved as well. With the TrustRank and Local Rank concepts, Google is attempting to develop their model on how to figure out what links matter the most. As the years go by, they will continue to refine this process. When Google finally reaches that point, you already want to be there. Now is the time to focus on these concepts because if you don't, when Google makes a change and your rankings fall, it will be much harder to reach the top.

AA: What is your advice on dealing with these types of links for agents, especially agents who are enjoying high rankings in Google currently?

GB: These state pages with cross-linking to other Realtors around the country that many real estate websites continue to keep are pretty much worthless now. In my research I have checked many of these types of sites and found that in most cases the link pages are not indexed in Google, or have gone supplemental.

With that in mind, my recommendation would be to delete all your state pages or other pages that host any cross-linking with other real estate agents. Start, or continue focusing your efforts on quality community links that will make your website a trusted domain.

AA: Can you explain in more detail about pages that are currently not indexed or in the supplemental index and how that is affected by inbound or outbound links.

GB: Google's PageRank system currently drives how the Googlebot crawls websites. Google's internal PageRank for each web page is an important factor for whether the pages are in the main, or supplemental index. As PageRank is strictly determined by links, this drives the point home that high quality and trusted links are the way to keep Google happy with your website.

While Google PageRank is only updated on the viewable toolbar once every few months, Google internally updates PageRank scores on websites all the time. Most real estate websites do not have a high enough PageRank to support hundreds of pages being crawled and indexed. Especially real estate sites that have low quality links pointing to their homepage instead of high quality links and a natural linking process throughout the entire site. Deleting unnecessary or low quality pages, such as state link pages, will help focus PageRank and Google crawling on the pages that really matter.

AA: Thanks Greg! This information will really help the real estate community understand the search engine process. Are there any final thoughts you have for a real estate agent getting started on their first website?

GB: New agents have a big hurdle to jump over with so many older websites out there. Find your specialty and focus your website and marketing efforts around those elements. Start a blog and incorporate it into your website which will really help you be recognized using RSS (Really Simply Syndication).

AA: Thank you so much Greg. We hope this information will help new and old real estate professionals perfect their online strategies.

We hope you have found this interview helpful in determining the right online marketing strategies for your website. Quality inbound links continue to play an extremely important role for your websites visibility. Low quality pages and links that do not pertain to your community of influence will not help you and could potentially hurt your lead generating sections of your website. If you feel you need greater help analyzing your links, we do have our Link Tracker Plus program available.

You may have questions about some of the information above. We encourage you to contact us for more help, or visit our Advanced Access Forums which are for members only. Greg Boser has also been dropping by the past year to talk more about the search engines so definitely come by and read the latest. Marketing on the Internet can get very technical and detailed but will help you make the most of your online presence.

We wish you the best of success in your search engine marketing! As always, we thank you for your continued business and support, and we will strive to continue to bring you the latest search engine marketing techniques in our weekly Marketing Tips.

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