Sharon Wilson

Over the last couple of weeks we have noticed a real surge in the number of search queries on fastrealestate. There is a lot more interest in the us property market from off shore investors. The media have feature stories in Australia about the cheap house deals in the US and it's clearly showing on our stats with a real spike in Aussie visitors. Of course coming out of winter into spring has it's own benefit but with some luck the tide might be starting to turn on the real estate market both in the US and the rest of the world.

Recent posts from our forum

One in five Florida home loans behind

Investment properties on the way

Note holders wanted

I'm sure you all know our site www.fastrealestate.net - I'm happy to see your sites listed in the comments here as long as you take the time to review another site along way... Lets see how it goes.

There are more than a few good SEO's who think Google places some sort of cap on traffic on a site by site basis. I was wondering if any of the search people here have any thoughts on this or first hand experience perhaps. We certainly have sites in our network that have grown in content by hundreds if not thousands of pages and yet the daily traffic remains about the same. Recently we "pushed" a site through the threshold and watched the organic traffic go from just a few thousand per day to 15,000 uniques per day. It looked very much like the brake had been released at some point.


"I have a strong suspicion that google is "Traffic Throttling". This started about a year ago when we saw a lot of newer sites start appearing in the serps, displacing many of the older, established sites that had dominated the top 10 positions for years.

Google had to figure a way of giving everyone a piece of the pie, without causing too much disruption to the older, respected sites. Some of the newer sites certainly deserved to start getting some decent results on some search terms.

So in my sector, I saw my site (and most of my long stranding competitors) losing position on a number of key terms, with some newer sites coming in on certain terms.

For example, I would find that my search term "red widget" retained it's number 1 or 2 spot, while I sank to page 2 of the results for "blue widget", with my previous top 3 position taken by one of the newcomers in our travel sector.

Around the same time, the number of google referrals into my site became very stable, with very little fluctuation in daily totals.

Previously, there had been some wide variations in the amount of traffic received from google.

They had to figure some way to give decent newer sites some recognition and placings in the serps, and putting a limit on the amount of traffic it sends through to a domain appears to have been a way to achieve this."

Quote from WMW -

This is a great subject, I am certain google has a way of limiting traffic. I've created enough new sites over the last couple of years to know this issue is very real. More recently I had a site jumping between #3 & #9 for a 3.5 million per month term. Volumes would vary from 35 vistits per hour to 140 vistits per hour, shortly after we dropped away to a steady #8 - 9 and peaked at 25 - 30 visits per hour. The last couple of days we are steady at #6 and peaking at #40 per hour. My point is this, we are still a long way below the 130 per hour and we have sinced moved into the top 5 for another high volume term on the same site and the traffic level remains about the same. Google is giving with one hand and taking with the other. It's clever, they have so many versions for any given search term it makes their system that much harder to game and they can still return good results. I think at some point you do break through this threshold, once you gain the right amount of points. Content alone will not get you where you want to go, I've tried just adding more good quality content to a couple of sites and the traffic remains about the same.

So this agent who has a pretty high local profile is starting a new office, she is breaking away from the main group to spread her wings so to speak. I've known her on a couple of levels for more than a few years and on a Saturday I got a call from her with regards to the "issues" with the current version of their new website. Against my better judgement I got involved only discover a site that looked very much like it was coded by a programmer with 13 fingers and a bad LSD habit. Lots of functional errors and non existand on page seo consideration as well. Did somebody say total mess? I guess it just surprises me that this sort of stuff still happens and that people get sucked in to paying for second rate sites so often. I don't have the time to get started on the "SEO" package they paid for....

Speaking of bad code we had a few "login" issues at fastrealestate during the recent upgrades so any feedback you might have is more than welcome.

While we are in the process of doing a long overdue update to FASTREALESTATE it's amazing how many small things you find that just might be keeping your site out of that number one place in the search results. Things like browser compatiblility and code validation, h1 / h2 and so on. Then you need to consider crawl structure and a decent XML sitemap generator. It's only been a couple of days since the first version of the new templte has been uploaded and already we can see an increase in the search traffic. As things stand the forum template is still in with the designers but it's the last part of the current stage. I expect a good increase in overall traffic from the updates and I will keep you all posted.