There’s been a great debate (cross post) running around the web lately regarding the effectiveness of an indexable IDX solution. While the debate seems to have arose around the release of our new dsIDXpress indexable IDX solution, the concepts behind the debate are not. We’ve been diligently following these conversations across the blogosphere and decided to address the concerns here on our own blog. Before I get into the meat of it, allow me to just summarize everything you’ll read below. Our stance is that, while the MLS content itself may be the same, we believe that search result limits we set on our end and our strong suggestion to deep link to areas and listings will ensure that there’s enough room for everyone in the MLS content playground.
We’d like to come right out and say that we DO set limits on the number of listings that can be shown / spidered / paged through for any given search. We currently have the limit set at 500 results per search, but we may adjust that in the future as we do more research and as MLS rules change. We implemented this limit for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is it prevent well ranked blogs in major metro areas from simply linking to the results page for the major city for that area and gobbling up the #1 position for ALL of the addresses in that area without doing any more work. This is NOT to say that you can’t put the entire MLS on your blog. Instead, what we strongly recommend based on our own research is for those who any indexable IDX solution, including our own, to deep link to smaller result sets and even individual listings.
In other words, if you’re a broker servicing Boston and wanted to use dsIDXpress (or, again, any indexable IDX), we’d encourage you to not just link to the search results for Boston and call it a day. Not only would the results for dsIDXpress be capped at 500 for that “search,” but the older results on, say, page 20 wouldn’t be indexed very well at all. Perhaps more importantly, it wouldn’t be helpful for your visitors either; after all, who really wants to look at ALL of the Boston listings in one sitting?
Instead, with dsIDXpress specifically, we’d recommend following our getting started guide and tailor both your link destinations and your site content to you visitors’ needs rather than trying to get everything indexed by search engines with no time investment and a single link. For example, the easiest first step would be to add the dsIDXpress listings or areas widgets to your blog and simply add the most popular communities you service to the widgets. Next, we’d recommend creating content pages for all of the communities you service and then using our Live Listings(sm) shortcode technology to insert an auto-updating property list directly into the content pages themselves. If you’re a broker as in the above example, you could even farm out the creation of content to your agents; they should know and be able to write a few paragraphs about the areas they specialize in better than anyone else. In that same community, zip, or city content page, you could also strategically link to property results for, say, listings in Fenway between $500k and $600k so that the content would be helpful to both search engines AND your website visitors.
Finally, for those of your concerned about getting banned from search engines for putting an indexable IDX on your site, we’d like to point out that there’d be thousands of sites already that would be banned if that were the case. Between all of the large brokers and national websites that do it already (Movato, Sawbuck Realty, Redfin, Realtor.com, Move, Homes.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, and the list goes on and on and on and on) and the agents / brokers who have the extremely expensive websites that also do it, we’ve never been aware of a single site that has been penalized for that alone. It’s certainly true that there can only be so many results in the “Google Top 10,” but that’s why recommending our best practices and encouraging you to spend some time tailoring your website to the communities or areas you service to get to the top of search engines for those areas.
Overall, we feel that there is a compelling argument to not be too concerned about duplicate MLS content due to the indexable IDX alone. If you create good content AND link appropriately to the IDX content, we’re confident that you’ll end up engaging your visitors more and rank well in search engines in no time at all. We’re sticking to our guns on this one.
P.S. This is neat. One of our original dsIDXpress beta testers, Jim Duncan, is ranking extremely well in Google by doing exactly what I talked about above. Check out this random Google search I did for 5453 Park Rd, Crozet. The #1 result that I see right now is that property on his domain with the dsIDXpress plugin generating the content. I also see Zillow, Yahoo! Real Estate, Realtor.com, and Homes.com in that list, but they’re all ranked below him. Sweet!
There are duplicate news stories on the web and they don’t get penalized for that. Yes, it is true that the major players are indexing their content to get a SEO pop and rank higher than the real estate community.
I want to focus on communities within the cities that we cover but I’m having trouble making that work within the widget.
My concern with the new plug in goes beyond duplicate content…how does dsIDXpress encourage or engage the consumer to create an online notebook, save their favorite properties and become a VIP member of dsSearch Agent? I find registration to be a debatable topic as well.
Andrew,
You are right about the top 10 on google. But lets face it, the big players with deep pockets have been getting the traffic for a long time and have even build million-dollar companies. You’ve named a few in your post. And during the past month, I’ve read articles on how there traffic has grown so much over the year.
Well, it’s time the little guy who actually works the local area takes back the search results and provides a better user experience. Take for example Redfin. They don’t even work on short sales. In my area, short sales account for a large market share. Are they really doing the client an advantage? I would think not.
This plug-in gives us a chance to shine and compete. If I was the big guys, I’d be running scared about now. With local agents implementing local indexible results, they will loose market share fast and have to result to costly advertising.
Thanks for making this plugin! Keep it rockin with the updates!
I always thought that allowing SE robots to index an idx page was a violation of the MLS… with that being said, if it is, it’s definitely not enforced by the MLS.
Google probably couldn’t care less.
I’m just a small-town realtor trying to find an idx solution for a wordpress blog. I stumbled here somehow. Let me get this straight–this new idx solution would put me in direct competition with realtor.com, trulia, zillow, etc. Is that right? Are you kidding me?
Is there lead-capture somewhere in it?
Is it just a way to pump my blog up to the top of Google?
Like I said, I’m not a techno-geek, just a small-town realtor.
The new plug-in is fabulous! Looking forward to having the ability to capture leads, request showings, etc. This will be the absolute ‘must have’ for agents/brokers!
I know this solution works when I get tons of calls from other agents where their clients found a listing on one of my blog’s where I am running the new IDX plug in by Diverse Solutions.
That means that their clients are searching for Real Estate and with all of my Links – Over 20 pages to date, where I have only blogged about 20 or so specific links that I have built, will find a listing on my blogs before they will elsewhere.
Parsing out the listings with focused content is the way to go. It also allows you to rank for lots of local communities which is key for our site.