I'm a fairly technology saavy agent. I have seen a more than a few less than saavy agents in many markets make the mistake of not choosing the right technology provider or making decisions in the absence of any technology education. In this post, I'll show you some examples of folks who have been burned by technology providers and others who are just begging to be made an example of. Take a look at these folks and see if you are in need of a technology strategy change.
Jonathan Rivera, who had his facebook page removed without notice. By mid-2010, Rivera had managed to build a great online presence, spent countless hours and resources building his Real Estate Agent Referral Group on Facebook. Shortly thereafter River was contacted by the National Association of Realtors and asked to rename his group, which had violated the NAR's trademark "REALTOR", by using REALTOR in the URL of his facebook page. That's a big technology and agent no-no. Anyway, Rivera's page was shut down. Can you imagine the feeling of investing hundreds of hours of time building a website asset and waking up one day to a 404 when you try to login to your web page? There was a happy ending for Rivera. After NAR got the "realtor" removed from the internet, they asked Facebook to reinstate the group and the group was given back to Rivera!
Real Estate Webmasters and several REW client sites were in 2008 when they got deindexed from Google for allegedly exchaning link among its clients. Link exchanges, and abuse of said exchanges in an attempt to manipulate search engine results, caused the banning of many folks who deserved to be deindexed from Google and caused many folks who just happened to have strange link profiles to be deindexed. I have no idea which is the case for Real Estate Webmasters from 2008, but the point is that you should be aware of what is and is not allowed when optimizing pages and in general, just running a web site.
There are many, many more examples of being burned by not staying abreast of technology, but I'll let you do some research and expand your knowledge through self exploration!
Several agents here in Austin who use a company called Realzi to create their websites. Realzi has recently obtained their corporate real estate license in Texas and is actively running a website targeted at the same customers that their clients are targeting. One would have to ask what the agents using these sites are thinking, but maybe they just don't know that the company running their websites and lead generation tools has entered the real estate business. Hard to say, but the take away is know your provider and what they are doing. The day ActiveRain decides to compete directly with me in selling real estate in my market is the day my blog comes down.
Any of the countless, completely uncustomized Z57, Top Producer, or other template based sites? As I feel that these template sites are not good and don't deserve a reference from ActiveRain, I've intentionally not linked to said website providers. Not to demonize them, but they are not as good as many open source and free services and software like Wordpress or Joomla or Drupal. These products are just as easy to use and may be easier since you'll have tons of other users and forums from which to seek help and find documentation. The key is that setting up the site is not the hard part. It is just the price of admission to the SEO game. The hard part is creating UNIQUE content and obtaining links to that content.
Check out your latest technology decisions and make sure you are not guilty of any faux paus whether they are yours or your technology providers. If you don't you may be asking Google, Bing, and Yahoo to relist you or building your web assets back from scratch!
If you allow others to post on your blog or website. Use a service like Copyscape to make sure that they are not using content that is not theirs. This service will run checks and see if your content appears in other places on the web and can keep you from posting content that belongs to others as well as detect when you content has been taken.
Use image searches like TinEye to find out if your work or your paid for work product is being taken. Here's an example of one company who either posted, or had his technology provider post, all the images from the MLS to Flicker. Kinda think it was the technology provider since it was most likely done programmatically. Who has time to post 11,000 listings worth of images to flickr?
Check out what other companies are doing on their websites and compare that to Google Webmaster Guidelines. Are they spamming the search results with computer generated blog posts that are just links intended to manipulate Google? Do they have websties with little or no original content that are soley created to rank in Google?
Send Google a Spam Reports. That's right. Let Google look at the alleged offense and determine if they should be penalized. A site with questionable tactics should be removed.
Send notes to the publishers of your content and ask that it be removed as I did in the case of the entire MLS image database being posted on flickr. You can find the email addresses of the site administrators at the bottom of their website pages most of the time.
Find a reputable search engine optimization company and technology provider. You'll be glad you did.
Submit complaints to your local board, MLS, or association when people do less than cool things.
Lastly, keep on the right side of the line yourself. :) A penalty from google is not a fun way to start the day. If you liked this post, reblog it. If you can add something to the discuss, please do!
REMAX Austin is a small office of experienced agents. We work Austin and surrounding areas, but specialize in the 360 and 620 corridors.
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