Lessons Learned from the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World Contest
My original post on the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest generated quite a few comments. A good chunk of them were a couple of individuals talking smack at each other, but there were a few others that are worth discussing.
Towards the end of the comments, Paul posted the following:
Well I did notice that you are ranking number 2 for this contest. So does that mean you are in the fight to be the best real estate agent in the world?
And my response was:
If by “in the fight” you mean am I actively participating in the contest, then the answer is no. The only effort I’ve expended is writing this post. Where it ends up will be determined solely by the level of authority this site has. I can’t imagine that it will hold up in the long run because I haven’t recruited an army of friends to go out and drop anchor text on every spammy do follow blog on the web.
But the fact that this page is doing so well without all the effort being put into the other pages is actually a valuable lesson for most agents. Unfortunately, very few will get it.
After that comment, Eric Bramlett (the contest creator) responded with:
Come on, man…this is some great linkbait. You’re naturally garnering links all over the place by taking the contrary position. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s “write linkbait, not spam.” I’m sure your blog carries weight on its own, but you’re ranking b/c people are linking.
Come on Eric. Suggesting that my post is somehow winning the “link war” is just ridiculous.
As I write this, Yahoo is showing 869 links to my post (excluding pages on this site). The vast majority of those links came from my post appearing in the Bloodhound Blog’s Long List. That list is distributed to other sites via a php based (server side) widget. My post was written on the 13th, and found its way into the Long List on the 14th. (I didn’t submit it, nor did I ask anyone to submit it for me).
Because the widget shows only a set amount of the most current posts, the links eventually disappear. (In my case, that has already happened.)
Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that distribution in the BHB Long List was in fact solely responsible for my post hitting #3. 869 links sure sounds like a lot, but it’s not really when you take a closer look. The total number of links reported is due to the fact that the widget creates site wide links on all the sites that use it. But the total number of unique domains that show up in my backlinks is actually very small. That’s important, because we don’t want any agents reading this to walk away thinking that a high volume of links coming from a single domain is treated the same way as the same number of links coming from unique sites, because that simply isn’t true.
If you move on and look at the remaining links, you’ll see that many are either nofollow, or they use some anchor text other than “Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World.”
Now let’s take a look Eric Blackwell’s (The contest leader) backlinks. Yahoo is showing 3,240 backlinks.
Eric also has links from BHB’s Long List, but his are still active. In theory, those should go away by Monday. (But based on this post, plus a couple of private emails, I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow found a way to stick around for a couple of months:)).
The rest of Eric’s links are a combination of various agent sites and pages on “free sites.” that are owned/created by the members of Eric’s “team.” Even if you take the BHB links out, he still ends up having far more links from unique domains, and virtually all of his links contain the exact phrase. With all that extra work you might expect a huge difference in rankings between the two pages, but there isn’t. His post is sitting a #1, and mine is currently #4.
So does that mean Eric is a bad person, or his SEO strategy is inherently evil? Of course not. Although I haven’t personally met Eric, everyone I know who knows him says he’s a standup guy. But the purpose of this contest is supposed to be teaching and learning, so I do think it’s valid to point out a couple of possible wrong conclusions a new agent watching from the sidelines may draw.
Strategy Viability – There isn’t really anything bad about Eric’s strategy as it applies to this contest. In fact, the “team” strategy is by far the most commonly use strategy in the history of SEO contests. But the problem is it just isn’t applicable to most real-world situations. I mean seriously, think about how far you would get trying to ask a bunch of people to invest significant time for free, in exchange for a link that they will get only after you have achieved a #1 ranking for your money phrase for two months. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. And even if a newbie agent realized that the contest examples are extreme, there still isn’t any place for them to end up other than the conclusion that the best thing to do is swap links. And that’s not a place they need to be.
Building Authority – I think much of the examples in the contest do nothing but reinforce the common misconception within the real estate space that dropping keyword stuffed links on some of the most spam infested domains on the web, somehow contributes to building authority. That’s a complete load of crap. Building authority involves investing the time necessary to develop a strong content distribution network powered by other humans. Whether or not my original post was intended to be linkbait isn’t really the important point. The real takeaway is understanding that the success or failure of a piece of linkbait is directly related to the size, strength, and quality of your distribution network. And gaining links by pushing content through that distribution network never involves asking anyone for anything.
In the end, the question you really need to ask yourself is where do you want to be down the road? Someone who operates a site where link building consists of pressing the publish button, or someone who has to constantly be asking for a helping hand?
The Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World
No, this post isn’t a plug for my favorite real estate agent. This post is about yet another SEO Contest. “The Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World” contest is being sponsored by Real Estate Webmasters. Having recently been released from Google jail, everyone in REW land is pretty excited, so why not celebrate by having a contest?
Upfront, it sounds like a fun exercise, and the prize package is actually pretty sweet. (A free site with lifetime hosting). But in the big picture, I don’t think it’s such a great idea. Especially considering the level of scrutiny the real estate space has been under lately.
The thing that most contest participants don’t consider is the fact that everyone is watching. (Including search engine engineers). Once the contest starts, people get obsessed and start pulling out all the stops. Then, when everything is said and done, all those cool little tricks, and quite little places you use to power your own rankings, either vanish, or become so overrun with “real spammers” that they become totally useless.
During some of the more recent SEO contests, I saw complete networks of sites get torched because one guy was stupid enough to put links for his contest phrase on the same sites he was using to drive the rankings for his “money” sites.
So the question to ask your self is whether or not winning a prize worth 4-5k is worth the potential negative impact that the site that puts food on the table might receive?
If you are 100% sure there are absolutely no skeletons in your link closet then you might decide that the answer is yes. But that isn’t the case for a huge chunk of the real estate SEO world. Almost everyone has dabbled in things that are now considered taboo. And there is a small underground community of real estate agents who are really good at SEO, which means they push the envelope quite often. If you consider yourself a member of that community, the best decision you could make is to “just say no.”
Real Estate Webmasters Banned by Google
I try very hard to stay away from the drama that constantly engulfs Morgan Carey and Real Estate Webmasters. But this one is worth commenting on because it’s such a great example of what not to do.
Late last night, members of REW’s forum started posting that they weren’t finding REW in Google searches. This morning my inbox was full of emails asking if I thought they were penalized. After conducting a few searches on their most popular terms, it appears that they have been tossed in the penalty box. Not only are they not showing up, there seems to be an across-the-board toolbar adjustment as well.
Morgan’s reaction was to write a very long post that outlines his penalty assessment process. While discussing REW blogs, he quotes from his TOS the section that clearly explains REW’s strict stance on behavior intended to manipulate SERPS:
"Search engines: REW blogs perform very well in search engines - this is due in no small part to the fact that our authors write high quality (Unique) content that does not violate any search engines guidelines and is often referenced from other sources on the web. Our rules against link spam and other forms of search engine spam or low quality advertising posts ensure that REW Blogs are able to maintain their authoritative status by providing our readership with the highest quality (Unique) content possible. It is also very important that these rules and regulations are strictly enforced so that search engines can trust that they are indexing and ranking high quality "Human" contributed, edited and moderated content. Link schemes: Any attempt to artificially inflate page rank or link popularity is not welcome here. Search engines frown upon this kind of behavior, and it does nothing for the user experience - when a link is placed in any section of REW Blogs (In a post, in the relevant reading section, in the related links of a post) it should be done so for the sole benefit of the user, and NOT to send yourself link juice / page rank."
He also goes on to say:
Just to be clear directory aside - Real Estate Webmasters does not participate in any kind of link exchange (Solicitation or otherwise) on our domain http://www.realestatewebmasters.com. We do not sell links from our domain http://www.realestatewebmasters.com, we don’t buy links, we don’t spam comments with our links - in fact - we are so damn busy building technology for our clients that we wouldn’t have the time to go out and try to get links even if we wanted to - it’s the old "The carpenter’s house is in the worst shape in the neighborhood
By the time you get to the end, you walk away thinking that the penalty is definitely undeserved. But here’s the flaw in Morgan’s post:
He is making the assumption that any penalty that might be imposed would be directly related to guideline violations involving the REW site. It would be great if that’s how it always worked, but that just isn’t the case. (If you don’t think that’s true, just ask Bob Massa). Occasionally, search engines do issue penalties for general behavior that shows an overall disregard for the sanctity of their guidelines. And when that behavior is a direct contradiction to their constant flow of pro-guideline public spin, the penalties can be quite severe.
Here’s an example: (from an email being sent out by REW staff)
My name is Nick May. I am a Link Manager for Real Estate Webmasters. I am emailing you today to introduce a new, free system we have developed, based on contextual-quality links. This system is designed to put more focus on a fewer amount of links, as they would be located on pages full of content, relative to the site. Instead of having links placed in directories, 5 links will be placed on an already established contextually relevant page. Our format will be a bit different than the format you use. Your links, on our pages, will appear as comments and we will be using your keywords as the commenter’s name. You add 5 of our clients to one of your content pages and in return, we will add your site to each of those client’s sites, on a content filled page. This is just an introductory email to let you know a little bit about it. This system is working for our clients and I have some examples to show you, if you’re interested. Email me back and I will fill you in with all the information you need. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you will take part in this excellent new program.
(Emphasis Mine)
OK, so last spring many of REW’s clients got in trouble for cross-linked directories. Now, six months later REW staff members are sending out dozens of these emails (and have been since last June) offering to create fake blog comments stuffed with your desired keywords in exchange for you putting back the links that used to be in the spam directories that caused all the trouble in the first place.
So how is it Morgan forgot to mention these emails in his public plea to Matt? Is this employee sending these emails without Morgan’s knowledge? (Maybe it’s the same employee that hacked into the PREN Forum?) Or maybe he thinks there’s no way Google would know about these emails? I have no idea for sure, but you at least have to give him some credit. It takes a lot of balls to stand up in public and declare to the world that your shit doesn’t stink, even when so many people know it does.
Looking for CSS Designers
I haven’t had any time to blog lately because I’ve been buried with work related to PropertyTown. We’ve been banging out a bunch of new features, and we’ve been swamped with inquires from agents interested in moving on to our system. All in all, the new year has been good. The only real problem is the fact that we don’t have enough manpower to handle the frontend design work.
We are in desperate need of freelance CSS designers who can crank out quality designs for our clients. Our system runs off of a single master theme, so there is no php work involved. We just need people who can take some static html and our master CSS file and turn it into something stunning. (ala http://csszengarden.com/)
We have several projects ready to go, and the number of inquiries we’re receiving is growing weekly, so we’re looking for people that are interested in a long-term working relationship.
If you are interested, please reply to (greg at 3dogmedia.com) with some samples of your CSS work, and I’ll follow up with you with more details.
Happy SEO Holidays
With the end of the year approaching I wanted to take a minute to send my wishes out to all of my SEO friends out there. I hope you enjoy this little video I put together. Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!! or Bah Humbug, which ever fits.
Real Estate Webmasters Accused of Hacking Competitor’s Forum
I just received an email from the Administrator of Pro Real Estate Network informing me that their security had been compromised and that I should log in and change my passwords. According to their post, employees of REW logged in to the Pro Real Estate Network forum by using the password of a Moderator who is also a member at REW. (note to self: Don’t use the same password on multiple forums)
Once inside, they proceeded to delete any threads that talked poorly of REW or it’s owner, Morgan Carey. Now I have no idea how accurate this accusation is, but if it’s true, I think it’s safe to say that the concept of “Reputation Management” has been taken to a whole new level.
New DoFollow Plugin
We’ve had a lot of great response to our DoFollow OPML project. While we work on compiling the list, I thought I would go ahead and release a new DoFollow plugin. We have been playing with several different plugins lately. Of all the ones we could find, we like the original by Kimmo Souminen the best. However, I wanted to have more control on a per-comment basis, so I had Dax add to it.
Once you’ve installed and activated it, you will be able add individual NoFollows or DoFollows from the comment moderation screen.
You will also find a new box on your editor that will allow you to add NoFollow to the comments of a single post.
You can download it here.
The PropertyTown Real Estate Project
I’m excited to announce the launch of a new project that has pretty much consumed all of the last 5 months for us. PropertyTown is our new marketing platform built exclusively for real estate professionals.
Project Background
I spent a good chunk of ‘06 and the first half of ‘07 doing some consulting work for a couple different companies in the real estate space. During those gigs, I spent a great deal of time looking at many of the companies providing hosting and marketing services for real estate agents. I was truly stunned at how poor most of the services were. The majority of the companies we looked at were selling less-than-optimal platforms and giving their customers very poor marketing advice.
When our last consulting contract was about to expire, we took some time to think about where we wanted to go. One of the options was for us to take on a new consulting job with a very large company that provided marketing services to thousands of agents. Our role in that project would have been providing them advice on how to develop new web 2.0 type applications that would help get their clients up to speed with the rest of the online marketing world. However, after a couple meetings, it became very clear to me that this particular company had far too much corporate bloat to ever be able to develop anything remotely cool in any type of reasonable time frame.
So we decided instead to explore the option of developing a product of our own. The biggest challenge was coming up with a plan that would not only be unique, but also fit us as a company. That meant that whatever we decided to do, it wasn’t going to be a high-volume, mass-marketed product. Instead, it needed to be something where we could leverage not only our programming capabilities, but also our years of SEO/SEM consulting experience.
We initially got the project rolling by recruiting a handful of real estate agents who were interested in participating in a beta program. We started banging out code and they spent a ton of time trying to break it. (And they did break it) They also had a huge role in feature development. They told us what they wanted, and for the most part, we built it. But the beta program wasn’t just about code. It was also about helping the agents learn new ways to build their online presence that wouldn’t end up getting them in trouble.
The project as a whole has been quite challenging. Turning Wordpress into a true CMS, and teaching real estate agents that there’s more to online marketing than keyword-stuffed reciprocal links were no easy tasks. But it’s all been worth it. In 5 months, we’ve accomplished more than some of the big “players” have accomplished in the last 3 years. We developed a ton of really cool features and tools, and our beta agents are doing exceptionally well. In fact, everything is now running so smoothly that we’ve decided it’s time to open up our community to new agents.
Join Our Community
If you’re a real estate professional who gets the web, and is tired of all the poor performance and broken promises that exist in today’s agent services market, swing buy the PropertyTown site and submit the contact form. We’ll follow up with you and schedule a call to discuss all the details involved with joining our community.
Join Our Affiliate Program
Also, if you’re someone who provides any other types of services for real estate professionals, you might want to seriously consider becoming a PropertyTown affiliate. We are offering a two-tier referral program that pays recurring monthly revenue for the life of the client.
Link Whores and Liquor Thieves
I while back, I received some swag in the mail from SEO Shirts. However, being the extremely lazy blogger that I am, I never got a round to giving them the link they wanted for the free shirt. So now I’m playing catch up.
Just for the record, I’m a big fan of “links for swag.” (Our mailing address is 23822 Valencia Blvd. Suite 310 Valencia, CA 91355) But I do think that if you are going to do it, you should take the time to make sure your swag generates maximum impact.
I think a T-Shirt announcing to the world that I’m a link whore is awesome. But this particular shirt falls a little short because of the size, typeface and colors used. It’s very difficult to read. A better approach might be a BOTW style white on black. That way, people could see that I was link whore from a good 100 ft. away.
Maybe Something like This?
Moving on…. I figured since it’s Beer Friday and I’m already pulling pictures out of the Blackberry, I’d go ahead and post a few more.
Last week, my good buddy Todd, accused me of swiping a cute little anti-spam flyer during a recent visit to the Plex. Now I can assure you that’s not the case. If I was going to take something off of a Google bulleting board, I would have took the picture of the weird guy with lines all over his face. (Which coincidentally, was posted in close proximity to the spam flyer….)
Most people think that Google is all about kitty cats and lime flavored soda. But the truth is, that’s not the case. As you can see by this picture, there are some Googlers who really understand the concept of “work hard, play hard.”
Hey, is that a bottle of Belvedere? (FYI, the most popular Vodka in the SEO world)
How did the bottle of Belvedere end up at the coffee kiosk?
And who is that pouring the Belvedere into paper coffee cups?
(I have no idea, but based on the style of shirt, I would guess it’s a Canadian)
And finally, here’s a photo from the end of the evening. It’s important to remember that if you leave your clothes hanging in the hotel bathroom with the shower turned on (anything to not have to iron) for too long, you will set the fire alarm off when you open the door. When that happens (at 2:00 am), the only way to get it to stop is to rip it off the ceiling and pull that battery out.
The Do Follow OPML Project
One of the things that happened over the summer while I was on my blogging hiatus was the launch of the “Do Follow” movement. For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s basically a group of bloggers who have realized that having comments and trackback links automatically default to “No Follow” isn’t really a good thing. (And it certainly hasn’t stopped the number of people attempting to spam comments).
The core concept behind the Do Follow movement is something I genuinely support. I’ve always moderated my comments, so anyone being a jackass never makes it live. Those that do make it through are either personal friends or trusted colleagues who I wouldn’t have any problem “vouching” for.
But the overall implementation of the idea in my opinion has been pretty poor. When I browsed through the many Do Follow Blogrolls or Do Follow directories, I found quite a few blogs that I would consider either poor quality or sites that are promoting things (selling text link ads or blog reviews) that I personally don’t want to be connected with. (From a linking standpoint).
I also noticed that for the most part, being part of the “movement” hasn’t really helped improve the level of participation in the majority of the blogs on the list. I think the biggest reason for that is the fact that the only real requirement to get on the list was to install a Do Follow plugin, and then put a copy of the list on your site. In the end, that just created a clever link swapping scheme. So once people got their sites added to the list, their support for the concept went away.
When everything was said and done, I found that the highest quality “Do Follow” blogs I cam across were ones that I found by accident. They weren’t on any published list, and they also weren’t displaying any kind badge that announced to the world that they support “Do Follow.” They were just great blogs being run by people who took the time to remove the link condoms, install the appropriate spam plugins, and dedicate some time to proper comment moderation.
Blogs with those qualities are the type of sites I’d like to spend time on. And those types of blog owners are the kind of people I would love to have comment on my blog, and in exchange for their commentary, I’d be more than willing ditch the love glove.
But there really wasn’t any easy way to find and connect with these types of sites. So I thought I would borrow an idea from Lee and try and put something together.
We have begun the process of collecting and categorizing feeds from quality sites that are not on any of the published Do Follow lists, and do not display any information declaring that they are a “Do Follow” blog. Once we have a good quality list built, we’ll turn it into an OPML file so it can easily be uploaded into any feed reader. The Do Follow OPML file isn’t going to be available to the general public.
So how can you get a copy?
Pretty simple really. Just help us build the list. If you have a blog that you think would be worthy, just visit our submission form and submit it. We will review your site and then make a decision on whether or not we will include it. If we do decide to include it, we will provide you with a copy of the OPML file, plus provide you regular updates as the list grows.
In the meantime, if you would like to start the process of going Do Follow, you find a great list of plugins here.
