Search engines are where most people start their web search and being ranked highly in search engines is a big deal. For any website, it is important to be highly ranked in search engines as this helps to drive more users. Recently, there has been some confusion or misunderstanding about Trulia in the blogosphere in regards to high search engine ranking. I think it’s important to address the concerns head on, so that you can understand Trulia’s strategy clearly, without distraction. It’s going to be a long one…and I hope this clears up what we do and where we stand.
Before I start – it’s worth clarifying a few things:
Our mission: To revolutionize the real estate web experience for buyers, brokers, sellers and agents. Now ranked the #8 most popular real estate site according to ComScore, with innovative consumer tools coming out monthly, with tens of thousands of broker and agent partners on Trulia – we aren’t there yet, but we are moving forward in the right direction.
Our model: Agents and brokers can add your listings to Trulia for free. People search on Trulia and when they want information about your individual properties, we send them to your website. Yes, that’s right, we send people interested in your listing to you – for free, the listing agent or broker…not to the highest bidder, like some other companies. We are not a non-profit. Our revenue comes from advertising products that brokers, agents, brand advertisers and others can, but do not have to, purchase.
Now that the basics are out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff about SEO and why we do it the way we do:
There are a couple of different things that have been addressed around “nofollows”, so I’m going to separate the different issues:
1) Property Listings – building Google page rank.
Yes, we put nofollows on property links. It’s part of our overall online strategy and part of what helps us become an authoritative and trustworthy site. This in turn helps us attract consumers and agents. We provide the infrastructure while consumers and agents together, create a thriving real estate community. In the end, if users are interested in specific properties, we pass these home buyers back to you – the brokers and agents. Here are answers to some questions we’ve heard from some of you.
- So I’m helping you become the authoritative site? The short answer is yes –listings, contributions on Trulia Voices, school info, stats and trends and all the other real estate information on our site helps us to be seen as an authority on real estate information and puts us at the top of real estate searches. The more detailed answer is that there are hundreds of factors involved in your google rank, and we work on all fronts to ensure real estate relevancy. Why do we do this? See paragraph above.
- Aren’t you just taking my listings, then selling interested people back to me? No, we are not a lead generation model. We don’t sell leads. Like Google, you can purchase featured advertising on relevant searches, but your organic listings will be made available whether or not you advertise. Consumers benefit when we do this and it will not change.
- So you are sending brokers and agents millions of visitors a month out of the goodness of your heart? No, this goes back to our advertising revenue model. Other than featured listings, we also sell branded advertisements. Aggregating an engaged home buying and home selling audience is good for Trulia, whether or not individual brokers and agents advertise their listings; it’s good for consumers because we bring together loads of timely information in a easy-to-use interface and we keep on innovating to make the experience better; and it’s good for agents and brokers as a platform to market themselves and their listings because they become discoverable by a wider audience of interested home buyers than they would have otherwise.
- So this means that you are competing directly with agents and brokers? No-we are not a brokerage firm and we do not compete for your business. Yes-sometimes we will be competing with broker or agent sites for consumer visits. Here’s where we think we play an important role in the ecosystem as a marketing platform and ultimately benefit agents and brokers. If a home buyer finds your listing on Trulia, we send them directly to you. Some of these visitors might have come to your site first, but instead found Trulia first and now they are coming to you via Trulia (for free). In most cases Trulia visitors are new traffic to your site that might not have found you otherwise. In this sense we are not your competitor, we are adding to your site visits. We think this a good thing.
- Why don’t you remove the nofollow from listings? Let’s be honest, most broker or agent websites would not rank better than they do currently if we removed the nofollow in the outbound links (99.9% of listings pages have no page rank or page rank 1). For those web savvy agents and brokers out there with robust local websites, you don’t need us to remove the nofollow. You absolutely can and should rank higher than us as Google will find your local sites more relevant—Greg Swann talked about this on BHB today. In sum – we don’t remove the nofollows because it could negatively impact our ranking and it probably wouldn’t help yours. Obviously not a smart business move for us today.
2) Web References on Trulia Voices - preventing spam.
Yes, we put nofollows on the web references in Trulia Voices. Here is what we are trying to prevent: Someone asks “I’m a first time homebuyer and I need help understanding different mortgage products. Help!” on Trulia Voices. Spammers (not agents) reply: “Buy Viagra now!” without a nofollow link. Yeah, that would be a horrible experience for all – consumers, real estate agents and Trulia. It’s standard practice on forums (Trulia Voices, city-data, and Zillow discussions are all “forums”) to include nofollows on comments to prevent this behavior.
3) Trulia Profiles – manage your SEO juice.
We do not have nofollows on links within your profile. That means that you can pick your term that you want to rank for (123 Main Street, Atlanta real estate, etc) and link to your website, blog or listing. With our profiles, you have flexibility to control where you want us link, and we have seen profiles as high as page rank 4 and page rank 5. The more active you are in the community, the higher your profile page rank will get.
Ah, we love a good dialogue. Send us your suggestions, we are listening.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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May 2nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
The room reeks of perfume, but I still see a turd laying on the floor.
Web sites like Trulia depend on the input of others to be valuable. Without the contributions of agents, brokers and consumers you have nothing.
tags were intended to curtail SPAM. However, we aren’t talking about SPAM. Instead we are talking about the only thing of value Trulia has (the inventory and agent participation). Putting “THIS IS SPAM” tags on your partner’s links is abuse.
I love Trulia and remain amazed by the system you have built, but this issue has bothered me from day #1. It is dishonest and punishes the people who have contributed to Trulia’s success.
> In sum – we don’t remove the nofollows because it could negatively impact our ranking.
That sentence above is what is really at the heart of this. Because many brokers and agents are unfamiliar with HTML and the finer points of SEO, you will likely manage to keep doing what you’re doing.
But, speaking personally, it would bother my conscious to back-hand the people who are helping me. This is what you are doing.
If you are an agent or broker, this issue should definitely leave a bad taste in your mouth.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Just think about how much revenue the brands have left on the table! The only reason Trulia or any other aggregator exist is because Brokers & Brands have not been able to create a viable consumer offering.
Why should anyone that does not sell real estate have real estate listings?
Again because the companies that sell homes have no viable offering.
Has anyone else noticed the big money coming into real estate has no interest in selling real estate? They want to use the data/content agents and brokers produce for free.
How easy do you think they will make it for clients to leave the site that has the advertising they get paid for?
Do you want your listings showing up next to “the Taminator, Sacrementos Number 1 Agent in the Three Bedroom, Two Bath $150,000- $200,00 price range”.
Trulia has a media model, advertise around content and protect their “turf”. The solid part of the model is that the content is free from production costs. How much money would the networks make if they did not have to pay for shows?
I think this is all nuts, but it is now what it is, can’t but it back.
They were smarter than the real estate community they rely on, and I promise they not only know it but laugh about it.
NOW QUIT WASTING TIME AND GO LIST A HOUSE, TRULIA NEEDS MORE LISTINGS
May 5th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Hi Gabe!
“Web sites like Trulia depend on the input of others to be valuable. Without the contributions of agents, brokers and consumers you have nothing.”
This is absolutely true, and it’s why we are so laser focused on providing a great experience for agents, brokers and consumers.
As such, hopefully it’s clear that we DO NOT see our listing providers as spam and it is NOT why we have nofollows on the listings. If that’s what it causes others to believe, it’s something that we need to consider, and we will.
We appreciate your feedback.
May 5th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Buddy, I’m not a real estate agent; so I will never be listing a house. Most of the points you are voicing I myself have voiced. Trulia is doing what the real estate industry is failing to do. They are providing consumer oriented innovation. I have no problem with this. In fact, I have been cheering them on much of the time.
My issue is with any community-driven web site that doesn’t share the “love” with the people who make their web site valuable. Perversion of the “nofollow” tag is an affront to the “open” nature of the Internet. Using it to demote your partner’s web sites is cheating. Wide-spread abuse of the “nofollow” tag would mean the big get bigger and the small stay small. When this happens, it will be impossible for future Trulia’s to find a foothold.
There are numerous ethical ways of securing a dominant Internet presence. For example, Trulia is giving away widgets. Use of these widgets litters the Internet with incoming links to Trulia. I assure you Trulia isn’t embedding those links in a “nofollow” tag. This is okay though. In this instance there is a fair exchange of value.
As Pete expressed; Trulia doesn’t want to promote anyone who might also have a real estate web site. I get that! But I also understand that Trulia needs the real estate industry to have content on their web site.
Compete by building a better product, compete by having a better strategy, compete through superior execution; don’t compete by cheating.
Conceptually, if a link has value, it shouldn’t be branded with a “nofollow” tag. On Trulia’s web site the links we are talking about contain the property details. Those links are certainly valuable, it remains wrong to brand them as “SPAM”.
May 5th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I don’t know if your post sways me enough. I think Galen is right.
May 5th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Here is a copy of an email I sent to Brenda Casserly, CEO of ERA and Bill Cogan our web guy:
Brenda and Bill: Please follow the link to the article I found on Bloodhound blog. It seems that Trulia is placing no follow tags on our listings that are fed from ERA.com. This practice is to the broker’s, the agent’s, and ultimately ERA’s detriment. Since we are a pioneer in feeding listing sites, it seems only fair that we should benefit fully from the listings we provide Trulia.
http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=3059
–
Tom Johnson
ERA Silver Star Realty
May 6th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Trulia, deliberately crippling the SEO results of your listing partners, in order to outpace them in long tail search results, is unfair, and dishonest. That is what you do when you take a listing from a agent, put it up on your site then no-follow the link back to the source of the date.
Your not protecting against spam, your protecting against the source of your data out ranking you in the search engines.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Boyer, accusing Trulia of spam is hilarious coming from you and others who are engaged in blatant link spam like the links placed at the bottom of the following pages:
http://www.jboyerhomes.com/SouthOrange.php
http://www.sunshinestatesales.com/nocatee.php
http://www.youragentgreg.com/home-inspection.php
Trulia is not spamming, but you are.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Boyer, what is unfair and dishonest, and lets add disingenuous for good measure, are your rants about Trulia doing what is totally legit, while you engage in link spam under the context of contextual linking.
I would love to see you file the spam report you urged others to do on BHB. Google has a tendency to examine the links of those who file spam reports.
September 27th, 2008 at 5:57 am
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