Trulia's Web-ranking strategies catch heat
Company's SEO strategies debated among industry insiders
By Glenn Roberts Jr., Monday, May 5, 2008.Bookmarking Sites
Web-ranking strategies employed by real estate search and marketing site Trulia.com have stirred up debate, with some real estate professionals saying the techniques are in competition with the Google ranking of partner sites that Trulia relies on as sources of its property listings information.
Galen Ward, co-founder for Seattle-based Estately.com, a real estate brokerage company that works on a referral basis to connect consumers with other brokerage companies, called out Trulia's search-engine optimization activities in a blog post at the BloodHound Blog, a real estate blog site.
Trulia has posted a response at its corporate blog that describes the intent and purpose of its search-engine optimization strategies, and maintains that its methods are good for both the company and its customers.
Ward described a process through which "Trulia becomes the original source for properties in the eyes of Google" through technical maneuvers that cloak the original source of property information. Without these efforts, which are referred to as "temporary redirects" and "nofollows," Ward says that "Google might rank the original source higher in the search results."
While Trulia does send traffic to broker Web sites when consumers click for detailed information about properties, Ward charges that the linking practices do not assist the broker in improving in Google's search rankings because Trulia's practices cause Google to miss the original Web site that is the source of the information.
"Why would brokers who share their listings allow this? My best guess is that they aren't tech-savvy enough to identify that this could be a problem."
The April 29 blog post has collected more than 100 comments in the past week, with discussion ranging from the business reasons for Trulia's tactics to the site's rankings competition with its partner broker sites.
In an interview with Inman News today, Ward said he reviewed the online discussion on the topic, including Trulia's response, and, "I am not sure I was swayed from my original statement."
While some people commenting noted that other real estate sites, like Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate, apparently employ similar SEO techniques, those sites are MLS-based and are bound by rules that Trulia is not, Ward said. Realtor.com, for example, is operated by Move Inc. through a contract with the National Association of Realtors, and receives data from many Realtor-affiliated MLSs.
Also, Ward said that he would be surprised whether many of Trulia's brokers are aware of the company's practices in directing traffic to broker Web sites through links that effectively ignored by Google's ranking algorithms.
"It looks sneaky," Ward said of Trulia's practices, adding, "I don't think (Trulia) is going to change unless they get a lot of pressure from brokers on this."
Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder for Trulia, noted in a blog post that Trulia does not plan to change its linking practices. "In sum -- we don't remove the 'nofollows' because it could negatively impact our ranking and it probably won't help yours. Obviously not a smart business move for us today."
The post also acknowledges that Trulia "sometimes ... will be competing with broker or agent sites for consumer visits."
Flint told Inman News today that there is "certainly a lot of confusion about 'nofollows' and SEO ... and a certain amount of misunderstanding," and that the discussion about Trulia's practices has been healthy.
"Our business model is to generate traffic to broker sites. We're one of the largest sources of traffic to broker sites."
There are many factors that Google considers in page rankings, Flint said, and "Google is a blackbox -- it's a complete blackbox, so we don't know exactly what to do to get to the top of search engines."
And it's no secret that online real estate companies, as well as agents and brokers are competing for the best possible ranking in Google searches.
"Getting ranked highly in search engines is really, really key to what everyone's thinking about. Do we think about how to get highly ranked in the search engines? Absolutely. Everyone's thinking about it," he said.
While Ward characterized Trulia's methods as "sneaky," Flint said they were nothing of the sort. The company's strategies "are absolutely transparent," and he said he could not quantify how much it would help the company's broker partners if Trulia changed its linking practices.
"The amount of traffic we send to broker's Web sites is huge relative to other sites in the industry. We haven't changed our policies in two and a half years," he said. Also, local real estate sites can and do rank higher in some instances than Trulia does for property searches at Google, Flint said.
Meanwhile, Ward said he doesn't expect a change in Trulia's linking practices would impact Trulia's rankings that much, as it may just mean that broker sites would rank higher in some instances than Trulia's site. "It would be minor in the long-run," he said.
Kevin Boer, broker-owner for 3 Oceans Real Estate in Menlo Park, Calif., and a real estate consultant who counts Trulia as a past client, said the discussion about Trulia's SEO practices "is probably a tempest in a teapot," and "for the most part, the SEO of most broker and agent Web sites is so bad ... that it's not clear that any additional incoming links from Trulia or anybody else is going to help."
Boer, who acknowledged that he is not an SEO expert, said, "I think the brokerages are getting a lot of benefit from their relationship with Trulia," and that brokers that pay attention to SEO can work to boost their site's own Google rankings.
"The takeaway for me would be: Brokers, agents, wake up. Why are you paying absolutely no attention whatsoever to search-engine optimization? If you paid as much attention (to this) as with the size of the font on open house signs, you might be doing better," Boer said.
***
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Submitted by Joe Manausa on May 5, 2008 - 2:16pm.
That is very interesting and unnerving. The problem lies in the fact that most of (us) real estate brokers cannot keep up with the changing technology and therefore fall prey to this type of activity all the time. Maybe the writing is on the walls...
http://www.tallymarketdata.com
Submitted by Brad Doering on May 5, 2008 - 2:23pm.
The truth of the matter is - Yes - Trulia is exploiting realtors - who have abosuletly no knowledge of the Internet or SEO for the most part, but not in the manner that Galen Ward. suggested.
It's even worse. - I am an SEO professional.
The problem isn't that Trulia isn't passing Link Juice (Google PageRank Value) to the broker websites, the problem is that the realtors are completely lost as to why Trulia ranks well in the first place, and therefore they are actually providing the very mechanism that allows Trulia to rank for well for each market.
Mind you that collectively searches are getting more specific as a whole on Google. Less "homes for sale" searches and more "homes for sale " searches.
Trulia is providing the novice REALTOR with WEB/WIDGET tools for the REALTOR to link back to the Trulia Market Pages from the REALTORs website that Google has identified as associated with a specific topical community or region. This isn't illegal or frowned upon by Google and a great form of linkbait when practiced by Internet Marketers... But most webmasters in other industries nowadays know that they are going to be giving back some type of link juice to the source they are referencing. The REALTOR community is not that knowledgeable about SEO so they take the Trulia Widgets, place them on their site, therefore giving Trulia power to rank for the volume phrases ( real estate) associated with that market. Trulia then allows the REALTOR or broker to place their listings on Trulia.com and then charges them per click to be in a featured listing. The REALTOR thinks they need Trulia for exposure but in the end Trulia couldn't exist without the Internet Challenged REALTOR.
SO REALTORS - BE AWARE - WHEN YOU USE A TRULIA WIDGET ON YOUR SITE, YOU ARE TELLING THE SEARCH ENGINES THAT YOU VOTE FOR TRULIA OVER YOUR SITE FOR THE SEARCH PHRASE AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR WIDGET. THAT IS WHY THEY ARE RANKING SO WELL.
Submitted by Brad Doering on May 5, 2008 - 2:25pm.
The truth of the matter is - Yes - Trulia is exploiting realtors - who have abosuletly no knowledge of the Internet or SEO for the most part, but not in the manner that Galen Ward suggested.
It's even worse. - I am an SEO professional.
The problem isn't that Trulia isn't passing Link Juice (Google PageRank Value) to the broker websites, the problem is that the realtors are completely lost as to why Trulia ranks well in the first place, and therefore they are actually providing the very mechanism that allows Trulia to rank for well for each market.
Mind you that collectively searches are getting more specific as a whole on Google. Less "homes for sale" searches and more "homes for sale + market" searches.
Trulia is providing the novice REALTOR with WEB/WIDGET tools for the REALTOR to link back to the Trulia Market Pages from the REALTORs website that Google has identified as associated with a specific topical community or region. This isn't illegal or frowned upon by Google and a great form of linkbait when practiced by Internet Marketers... But most webmasters in other industries nowadays know that they are going to be giving back some type of link juice to the source they are referencing. The REALTOR community is not that knowledgeable about SEO so they take the Trulia Widgets, place them on their site, therefore giving Trulia power to rank for the volume phrases (market+ real estate) associated with that market. Trulia then allows the REALTOR or broker to place their listings on Trulia.com and then charges them per click to be in a featured listing. The REALTOR thinks they need Trulia for exposure but in the end Trulia couldn't exist without the Internet Challenged REALTOR.
SO REALTORS - BE AWARE - WHEN YOU USE A TRULIA WIDGET ON YOUR SITE, YOU ARE TELLING THE SEARCH ENGINES THAT YOU VOTE FOR TRULIA OVER YOUR SITE FOR THE SEARCH PHRASE AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR WIDGET. THAT IS WHY THEY ARE RANKING SO WELL.
Submitted by G Dewald | Union Street Media on May 5, 2008 - 2:27pm.
The comment thread on Galen's post is worth reading if only for a number of excellent SEO ideas and concepts. It would be worthwhile to self-educate and learn about anything discussed in that thread that is unknown.
G. Dewald | Union Street Media | USM Blog
Submitted by Glenn Sanford on May 5, 2008 - 2:31pm.
Last year I had an opportunity to share the stage with Alex Gamburg of Trulia who heads up the SEO side of Trulia. Ultimately Trulia is using relatively low value SEO strategies to rank nationally. The war they are winning is the war that most agents and firms aren't fighting and that is the battle of the long tail. Of course they have developed some pretty cool algorithms for developing content at the neighborhood level which most agents just don't optimize around.
As one of the top Web based lead generation firms in the markets we compete we fair very well against Trulia and it is relatively straight forward to jump above them in the rankings including Seattle, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Nashville and Bellingham Washington to name a few. It's not easy and it takes effort, but it can be done by any firm or agent who understands what the search engines are looking for.
--
Founder / CEO
BuyerTours Realty LLC
Direct: 360-220-1470
http://www.BuyerTours.com/
http://realestate.bellingham.net/
http://www.seattlepowersearch.com/
Submitted by Tech savvy Broker on May 5, 2008 - 2:38pm.
The big issue here is TRUST: Trulia lies and simply cannot be trusted as a partner.
In the past Trulia has claimed that they help their partners in the search engine rankings, now they finally admit that their links don't help and they've known it all along.
Want proof....back in November 07 in the comments section of a similar story on Inman about the value of Trulia, Kelly, VP Broker Partnerships of Trulia, claimed in defense of Trulia "we’re investing substantial resources in optimizing partner listing links in the major search engines".
An anonymous response made then to Kelly's claim is still topical and accurate today-->
-----
This is simply an outright lie. I have never seen a straight link on Trulia to any external site (or a link without a no follow tag). If my assertion is wrong Kelly, please respond with a link to a page on Trulia where we can see a link that provides SEO benefit to the recipient.
Only brokers and agents who are completely clueless about SEO, and the Internet in general, are buying into Trulia's lies and providing listing feeds. For example, the brokers up in the Northwest, who get the Internet as well as anyone, are not playing ball with Trulia.
-----
See the whole discussion here http://www.inman.com/blog/2007/11/3/trulia-and-debate-over-value-media-c...
Bottomline - Why are brokers partnering with liars that can't be trusted?
Submitted by Brad Doering on May 5, 2008 - 2:40pm.
Glenn
You are wrong. They aren't link building based on directories(ie.low value techniques) nor focusing just on the long tail. They are getting an obscene amount of traffic now because they've got the head.
They are link-building, which is the heart of PageRank by providing REALTORS with tools that link back to market pages within Trulias site. This is all happening without the common REALTOR knowing about it...
Brilliant strategy but not exactly sustainable once the REALTORs catch up.
Nice plug for your services though.
Submitted by Vito Boscaino www.ServingColumbus.com on May 5, 2008 - 2:47pm.
Interesting article. I like the Trulia consumer interfaace, and find it to be far more attractive and usable than Realtor.com. To be honest, while I would love to have Trulia traffic enhance my SEO results, I am more than happy with the clickthrough activity I get from Trulia. Our site receives a steady daily flow of Buyers coming in from Trulia, while Realtor.com is completely disappointing and generates next to nothing in terms of traffic.
I spend close to 100% of my marketing budget on sites, SEO and PPC. And these are not insignificant dollars either. So far, Trulia has outperformed every other real estate dedicated portal that handles listings. Only Craigslist drives more traffic to our sites.
I will continue to post my listings on Trulia either directly or indirectly (through Postlets.com for example) because it serves my clients for me to do so. Our listings receive tremendous exposure from out integrated internet marketing program, and in the end we sell homes faster and at a better price because of these efforts.
Trulia is simply one tool in my toolbox. It is very well designed and very useful for what it does.
Vito Boscaino
Managing Partner
Help-U-Sell North High Realty
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.ServingColumbus.com
Submitted by Brett Young on May 5, 2008 - 6:21pm.
Some of the commentary here is right on--most brokers and agents don't realize that they are fueling Trulia's success. Without content provided as listings by brokers and agents, Trulia would be insignificant. It puzzles me why my agents do not focus on making their own website more relevant.
Brett Young
High Ground Realty
New Paltz Real Estate
Submitted by Rudy Bachraty on May 5, 2008 - 8:48pm.
Hi All!
As always, we appreciate everyone’s valuable feedback and I hope that readers of this post go to Trulia Blog to read our full response. If you were to do an in depth comparison between Trulia and all the other real estate listings sites, you would see how the rest of the industry compares. Having done so ourselves, we are confident that we provide our partners with a tremendous amount of value. For example, Realtor.com, Craigslist, Yahoo Real Estate, Dothomes, etc have nofollows on all links. Make no mistake, we value all our personal relationships with all our partners, talk to them often, and go out of our way to provide them with a superior experience.
From our testing, we found that individual listing pages have 0-1 pagerank at the most which means that if we changed our linking structure, the results would be negligible to our partners sites. But, individual agents can create free detailed profiles on Trulia. By doing so, agents are creating a frequently updated page with valuable content that search engines like google love. We have seen some agents profile pages rank as high 4-5, much higher than any individual listing page ever can. We believe this is quite valuable to an agent. In addition, we give the agent the choice to decide which links they want to insert on their profile which means they get to choose which website, blog or listing they would like to send the link juice to.
Transparency is important to us. Conversations like this from the community help us grow as a company. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us.
Regards,
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia.com
Submitted by Jeff Tomlin on May 6, 2008 - 12:04am.
I don't find the redirects that offensive. Realtor.com has been treating listing partners this way for years. It's certainly not the main reason for Trulia's search strength. I expanded a bit here: http://jtomlin.blogspot.com/2008/05/trulia-critics-right-or-wrong.html
Submitted by Joseph Ballarino on May 6, 2008 - 6:18am.
Real simple, don't use their widgets and don't link to them.. In the meantime, I can't ingnore the good traffic they send us..
Regards,
Joe Ballarino
www.AmerivestRealty.com
Submitted by Mega Broker on May 6, 2008 - 7:02am.
Conclusions From A Large Broker
Our executive team, technology staff and SEO consultants have thoroughly reviewed this issue and come to the following conclusions:
1. Trulia can't be trusted.
2. We will not give our listings to Trulia, as doing enables our most formidable online competitor.
Submitted by Jeff Tomlin on May 6, 2008 - 8:41am.
Mega Broker,
Not sure why I find myself leaping to Trulia's defense here but everyone comes from a certain perspective. To your conclusions:
1. Trulia promises free traffic, not link juice for listings. They do however provide link juice from other areas of their site, if that's what you are looking for...
2. I think the formitable competitor ship sailed way back when Realtor.com posted listings online. Trulia is just one of many sites that you'll be competing against. Is it better for you or your clients to pull listings back from Trulia? I'd suggest you co-op the mega sites rather than try and compete. There's a win-win out there for you.
Jeff
Submitted by Bart Wilson on May 6, 2008 - 8:49am.
I'm an SEO professional and the editor of two books on real estate marketing. In 2007, we received just over 7,000 responses to a survey we sent out to next time home buyers and we received more than 6,000 responses from brokers we asked to track where the PROCURING cause came from on their home sales for the previous 12 months.
Suffice it to say, Realtor.com was the big loser. So was Homegain, followed by Trulia. Why? it's simple. Next time home buyers are not going to web portals to help them buy a new home. 74% of them went to Google to look for their home in 2006-2007.
Trulia is just another Me Too real estate portal company. Their business model derives ad revenue from eyeballs looking at content as they post more listings into Trulia. I am not sure where Trulia gets their feature requests from, but it's clear they are not listening to next time home buyers. Our survey revealed that 82% of the next time home buyers who responded to the survey said they could care less about heat maps. They just want big photos, virtual tours and lots of homes to look at for free. No registration, just anonymous FREE search.
Consumers aren't stupid. But many of them are getting Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Thanks to Instant Rice, Instant Oatmeal, ATM Machines, FedEex... people have become quite used to getting what they want without having to wait.
Our two year survey has shown proof positive the REALTOR still remains centric to the real estate transaction. Which is why BROKERS should invest into SEO for themselves so they can enjoy an organic page rank so they are visible when next time home buyers are looking for homes in their area. Do we need Trulia for this? No. We just need Google. You have AdWords for instant results and for long term results, we suggest brokers go and find themselves a good real estate seo firm, and not a bunch of over promising Bozos.
Trulia is another infomediary and is part of the problem brokers face today. Tired of paying 30% of your commissions from Homegain? Tired of buying leads from LendingTree? Most of us are. Brokers need DISINTERMEDIATION -- not more of it. We need LESS vendors in our sandbox who are attempting to sandwich themselves in front of the broker and the customer.
Submitted by Glenn Sanford on May 6, 2008 - 8:52am.
Jeff,
I would tend to agree with your assessment. Every real estate firm has to determine how its going to compete... It's a case if you can't beat 'em then join 'em for many firms and even though those who are tech savvy may see the ways that companies like Trulia play and not be comfortable with it, it really comes down to how do we as real estate firms want to play and without strong SEO strategies in order to get exposure for our listings outside of the MLS we need to develop relationships with third parties like Trulia, Craigslist, Google Base and others.
All the Best,
Glenn Sanford
--
Founder / CEO
BuyerTours Realty LLC
Direct: 360-220-1470
http://www.BuyerTours.com/
http://realestate.bellingham.net/
http://www.seattlepowersearch.com/
Submitted by Mega Broker on May 6, 2008 - 10:49am.
Jeff, in response to your comments above:
1. As this discussion shows, Trulia clearly tricked brokers into thinking they would get search engine benefit from listings. They also started life by scraping our listings illegally. Trulia can't be trusted.
2. Trulia doesn't matter to our sellers, they only have 1.47% market share:
http://www.inman.com/news/2008/04/9/ziprealty-improves-5th-in-real-estat...
Why would REALTORS repeat our realtor.com mistakes again with Trulia, but with even less control?
Submitted by John Sabia on May 6, 2008 - 1:47pm.
I completely agree with Bart's post above. Unfortunately, just as you wrote people are used to getting what they want without having to wait, many real estate agents are looking for the quick way to get traffic without having to invest too much money or time and end up giving away more than they receive.
John Sabia
www.johnsabia.com/
Submitted by Jeff Tomlin on May 6, 2008 - 3:07pm.
Mega Broker, I'm not convinced that Trulia ever promised search engine benefit. I know they promised free traffic. They provide link juice from Trulia profiles, but I've never seen or heard of a claim that they will provide SE benefit from posting listings.
Trulia did start by scraping but they quickly changed their ways by working with brokers. They don't scrape anymore. If you turn the trust issue on its head, one could argue that a client may not trust you if you refused to provide their listing free exposure. One way we help generate the maximum selling price is to reach the largest audience possible, no? I know you are not contractually obligated to, but it's a matter of principle.
As far as control, Trulia provides you much more control than Realtor.com. In the old days, your MLS would send your listings to R.com. You have complete control with Trulia to send or not send listings.
It's hard to argue with free traffic. I wouldn't turn it down. Remember, having your listings on Trulia does NOT increase their search positioning. They are already there. Why not cash in on the free traffic? I don't get it.
Submitted by Ken Horst on May 6, 2008 - 4:48pm.
I agree with Bart;
...Our survey revealed that 82% of the next time home buyers who responded to the survey said they could care less about heat maps. They just want big photos, virtual tours and lots of homes to look at for free. No registration, just anonymous FREE search.
Property search needs to be simple, free and comprehensive. Home shoppers are quickly learning two things; one, they can access their local MLS by simply googling "city mls". and Two, map based search coupled with search saver technology makes it very easy to zero in on a neighborhood because of your kids school or a job relo.
The problem Realtors and brokers have is SEO isn't easy and there are only ten organic spots on the first page of Google for each keyword searched.
We have tried to address all of these issues on www.mlsmaps.com. By linking to only one agent/broker in each major market who provides free consumer access to the local mls, many of whom have implemented map based search technology, we keep it simple for all parties involved.
While we will start asking for a back link and yes, it will help drive up our ranking, it obviously helps our partners in each metro area as they have the territory exclusively.
The difference between MLS Maps and Trulia is that we give the home shopper access to more listings while giving the local Realtor all the glory as they are the ultimate provider of listings, not MLS Maps, Trulia, Zillow or some one else. This way the local agent gets to capture the visitor in their own drip marketing system and nurture them into a buyer over time. We can get away with this model as our overhead is minuscule compared to the Trulias of the world.
Submitted by andrew roth on May 6, 2008 - 7:27pm.
Regardless of what you think about Trulia, it is futile to continue debating the “nofollow” issue. MLS content is a commodity now. There are dozens of websites like Trulia out there. Are we going to monitor all of them? While all of you are worried about Trulia, there are dozens of other companies behind them who will continue to innovate and change the rules of the game. Trulia, Zillow, Roost, Estately, Google Base, etc… take the same data and slap on a different interface. Not exactly a big innovation. The teams that focus on customer data instead of property data win.
All of the SEO freelancers out there should view this a big opportunity to help the industry. There is no magic bullet to improve your rankings. Trulia is not in the wrong for using the no-follow tags, I cant believe this debate has gone on for so long. Inman should issue an apology to Trulia for not doing their fact checking. I dont expect to improve my rankings by syndicating my listings to Trulia. If I did, that would be a blatant attempt to game the google system and I am sure Matt Cutts (Google Guy) would quickly detect this and flag the links.
Submitted by Rudy Bachraty on May 15, 2008 - 10:16am.
Hi all!
Update - For some clarity on much of the misinformation and confusion going on here and elsewhere, please take the time to read our blog post - http://www.truliablog.com/2008/05/15/back-to-basics-trulia-was-built-to-...
Best,
Rudy
Rudolph D. Bachraty III
Social Media Guru, Trulia, Inc.