Back when I worked for them they were providing website solutions for real estate agents and brokers. They had a very nice solution and everything was going very well back then. But things change and if businesses don’t change as well they don’t last long. I was just bouncing around the Homes.com website and I could find no trace of the business I used to work for way back when.
History of Real Estate SEO
Anyway, here is my take on the history of real estate SEO. The real estate companies that got their start on the web did so by providing web services like hosting and web design for the real estate market which back then was the real estate agent and real estate broker. It was obvious that the future of the real estate industry would be tied to the Internet, but at the time real estate was mostly still behind the times and search engines were still pretty much a joke. Google.com was not even an idea yet and real estate websites were still a hard sell because people were still doing things they way they always had, without Google.com.So Homes.com was building a hosting empire around it’s domain and that meant a lot of webpages. In time Google comes along and implements PageRank and takes Internet search to a whole new level. With the revolution in Internet search capability and the growth of the Internet as a household search utility for anything and everything, the real estate industry, (buyers, sellers, agents and brokers) finally make it onto the web in full force. It soon becomes obvious that the real money is not in providing web services to real estate agents and brokers, but controlling the life blood of the industry itself, home sales leads! In other words, the real estate search engine traffic.
Major Conflict of Interests
It was a simple and logical decision to go after the money in real estate traffic. After all, nobody was in a better position than the big real estate websites to take advantage of the situation. There was just one tiny problem and that was a major conflict of interests on the part of the real estate websites. Selling agents and brokers web services that would allow them to take advantage of the rapidly growing Internet and it’s inherent search capabilities on one hand.And on the other hand using their web site and it’s new found ability to control search engine ranking for the vast number of search terms associated with the real estate industry. With large numbers of websites for real estate agents in every city and state it was simple to monopolize every conceivable search term used by home buyers and sellers across the country. And in those days, content is king when it came to SEO. So the same sites that were developed for real estate agents and brokers were and are still being used to control the real estate search engine traffic. A conflict of interests as simple as can be. But who is going to complain? Real estate websites never stood a chance and the majority of real estate agents and brokers that shelled out the money for fancy websites never made a dime with them. They just wrote it off as a loss on their taxes and an expensive lesson.
Eloquent SEO vs. Brute Force SEO
But there is one things that never changes, and that is change itself. And the Internet is certainly no exception. What worked in the past may still have an effect on things in the present, but not like it used to. The way the top real estate websites took over the real estate search engine traffic no longer as effective as it was a decade ago. I call it brute force SEO and Google.com does not care for that form of SEO any more. The top real estate websites are hanging on to their control of the search engines due to the momentum (or PageRank) they build up in the past.There is a new kind of SEO that Google embraces and I call it eloquent SEO. It’s SEO that does not depend primarily on PageRank to get results. In fact PageRank is almost useless against eloquent SEO. I’m not going to explain what I’m talking about here, but I don’t mind providing an example of eloquent SEO vs. brute force SEO. In my next blog post on this subject I’ll show you a webpage with (zero) 0 PageRank listed above a webpage with (six) 6 PageRank.
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