Real Estate Forums

fort lauderdale · 09-07-2005, 09:13 AM

HHI Golf Guy:
Thank you. I have already emailed Google and have emailed my hosting site.
I wish I had seen your post first. I had changed so much of the "stock text" that I thought it no longer duplicated the Point2AGent site. I have added many pages that no other agents have and I update it often. I am also paying more than $39 per month so that also hurts. It is very hard to swallow that after a lot of labor and late hours that this can happen. I have had over 1,000 hits per month on my site for the past 6 months and I have sold many properties due to this site so it is very hard to accept starting over again.

I sincerely appreciate your advice as well as others who have emailed me. This is a much more "friendly" forum than others I have visited.

Questions:
Is copyscape a good resource for removing the duplicate stock content? Also, since this is a template site, does it mean that all that Html code stuff would be duplicate as well?

Lastly, can you ball park what I should pay for creating and hosting a new site if I have to start over or if I am able to "transfer" if my site gets reinstated.
A million thanks!
john

fort lauderdale · 09-07-2005, 09:17 AM

LVH:
I meant to include you in the last email as well. Thank you.
john

HHI Golf Guy · 09-07-2005, 10:18 AM

Quote:

Is copyscape a good resource for removing the duplicate stock content? Also, since this is a template site, does it mean that all that Html code stuff would be duplicate as well?

Copyscape is a must use tool every month. Each and every month we check the key pages of our clients in Copyscape to see if someone has copied our pages. You would be surprised how often people will plagiarize good ad copy.

You don't have to worry about HTML. SE's look at the text to determine duplicate copy.

Quote:

Lastly, can you ball park what I should pay for creating and hosting a new site if I have to start over or if I am able to "transfer" if my site gets reinstated.

The prices will be all over the ballpark. For example, my design costs run between $3,000 and $8,000 per site. Why so high? I include hundreds of pages, professional ad copy, and basic on-page search engine optimization (full SEO is extra). What I do is more real estate web marketing rather than just web design.

I get a lot of inquiries for my services, and obviously not everyone wants to shell out that kind of money. So I will tell you what I tell every other agent that is not ready to invest in a full web marketing package. Do not spend any money on a template web site. Instead, go to your local high school or trade school and find a student to design your web site. Either talk to the class instructor or pin a message to one of the bulletin boards. There are some very talented students out there looking for beer and book money.

You can then do a limited pay-per-click campaign with niche keywords to drive traffic to your site. You can also use passive internet marketing strategies to bring people to your site (see my articles on web marketing on my site).

Web hosting is cheap. For Windows hosting I use WebHost4Life , and for Unix hosting I use Lunarpages. Registering a domain will depend upon who you use as a registrar and how many years you register the name for. I use Network Solutions for my registrar. They cost more than Go Daddy, but I have been very happy with their service for many years.

Good luck!

fort lauderdale · 09-07-2005, 10:55 AM

Ok HHI GolfGuy...

I have gone thru and deleted the stock text. Went back on copyscape and no results were found. Did I do this correctly?

Again, many thanks.
John

fort lauderdale · 09-07-2005, 12:48 PM

Hi HHI Golf Guy and LVH
I am attaching the email I received from my webhost. Thought you might find it interesting.....

RE Google has banned my site http://www.johnsabia.com

Hi John,

I'm sorry that you are frustrated. I looked up your Site and it doesn't seem to have a lot of the Point 2 default content on it so I can factor that out as a reason. Search engines often spider sites sporadically and their criteria changes constantly so it is always difficult to know what things factor in to get good results. As long as you keep your site up to date with rich real estate data, has no broken links and has non-reciprocal as well as reciprocal links to his Site you should be scoring high. I've included some material on "How to Market your Site" that may boost your ratings.

Make sure that your Meta tags contain specific information about your selling areas. The meta keywords are more important than the meta description. I'm told that people search for homes by Neighbourhoods so it's important that if you sell in more than one Neighbourhood have for example, "Realtors, Buy a home, sell a home, real estate, Michigan, Canton, Michigan, Plymouth Michigan, condos, houses, homes, for sale, buying etc." This will increase traffic to you and your site as a good rule of thumb ask some people what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for a home in Canton (make sure that you have all of those phrases and blocks of words in your meta keywords.

Add internal links. External and reciprocal links that just open a new window so people can browse other sites that are related to yours while keeping your Site "open" on their computers all the while increasing your SEO rating. It is very important to SEO ratings for people to be on your Site a long time. Ask yourself what keeps you on a Site for a long time? If you are looking for a house I would say pictures of houses and neighbourhoods in Canton, Plymouth and Michigan is a good place to start.

Take advantage of handshake listings and extra pages. Since you are a Professional member you have 250 pages (you can hide them so people are not bombarded with information) but the more pages you have the higher your SEO rating will go.

When adding a picture or a link make sure you fill in the Alternate Text fields (picked up by google). Also add text tags such as making things Bold and marqueed because Google also looks for text tags.

Take advantage of extra pages, pictures and listings. Again, the longer people are on your Site the better.

Check out www.highrankings.com written by a former SEO who is now writing advice columns Great beginner Info on two of the links right at the very bottom of the page and check out the FAQ section.

On Point 2 's message board there is a section for SEO lots of opinions and also ideas for what worked.

I checked out your Site Clyde. You could use a few more pictures, pages and other custom content. You could easily add a page and have a poll about the best tourist spots in Michigan, or a recent debate in your community (off leash dog parks are they good? bad? etc), you could also easily add in a RSS feed page which really is just current News stories (we at Point 2 use Yahoo News). These will all keep people on your Site longer all the while boosting your ratings.

Check out the featured Sites section and get some great ideas from some great Sites. http://agent.point2.com/Community/featured.asp

Check out the Search Engine Optimization area on the message board.
http://agent.point2.com/message_boar...rumID=12&x=713

We have a complete set of tutorials, including a discussion on marketing your website at:
http://agent.point2.com/Community/Tutorials/ MarketWebsite.asp

Hope this gets you started. Any questions please feel free to contact me.

Look for answers on the message board,

Kate
Client Support Analyst

HHI Golf Guy · 09-07-2005, 02:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fort lauderdale

Ok HHI GolfGuy...

I have gone thru and deleted the stock text. Went back on copyscape and no results were found. Did I do this correctly?

Again, many thanks.
John

Sounds like everything is OK. Once again, since I do not work at Google I cannot be 100% sure that is why your site was banned. But with all of the dupe content it seemed to be the most logical.

HHI Golf Guy · 09-07-2005, 02:20 PM

Quote:

Hi HHI Golf Guy and LVH
I am attaching the email I received from my webhost. Thought you might find it interesting.....

I didn't expect them to say it was their fauly

Quote:

I'm sorry that you are frustrated. I looked up your Site and it doesn't seem to have a lot of the Point 2 default content on it so I can factor that out as a reason.

Did they check out your site before all of your changes?

Quote:

Search engines often spider sites sporadically

That has nothing to do with your situation. If you were receiving Google traffic before, then you had pages in G's index. Now they are all gone.

Quote:

Take advantage of handshake listings and extra pages. Since you are a Professional member you have 250 pages (you can hide them so people are not bombarded with information) but the more pages you have the higher your SEO rating will go.

What the $%@&! Hide pages so people are not bombarded with information? Don't people use the internet to FIND information?

"The higher your SEO rating will go"? You should ask them what an SEO rating is. I have never heard of it. Of course, they probably mean rankings for individual keywords. If their statement was true wouldn't everyone try and create web sites with millions of pages? Sheesh!

Quote:

Check out [b]www-dot-highrankings-dot-com[/bl]

I would look at other resources first. Do a Google search on the phrase SEO Bitch, do some reading, and form your own opinion.

It's interesting how the discussion got turned around. Hopefully Google will give you some feedback and then you can contact these folks again.

KeysToFlorida · 09-08-2005, 06:01 AM

John,

I spent some time reviewing your site. Here are a couple of my observations:

First - I don't think the point2 site is the problem.There are people with point2 sites from across the country that enjoy great placement with Google. Several of the individuals that you link with are on the first page on Google in their markets. On the flip side, I would not link with so many people that all use Point2. They create a lot of internal pages that are the same for all their sites.

Second - I would review all the sites that you link with. When the sites that you link with get dropped with Google, and you continue to link with these sites, the tendency is to join them on the banned list. An example of the type of sites that I would try to avoid and remove is the "Wisconsin, Racine" site that links to www-racinehomesold-com site. I noticed that you are linking to lots of sites that are not in the Google cache. On my main sites, I will not link to sites that don't have their home page and the page(s) that link to my site in Google's cache. At times, I do add links from some of my other sites to try and help a site get included - if after a week their links page is not in the cache, I figure something is wrong and move on.

FYI - I have removed my link to your site until we are able to figure out what is going on. I appreciate that you just added my site. My concern for my site, is consistent with what I would guess caused your situation - linking with sites that Google has dropped. All the discussions about not linking to bad neighborhoods or the sites that Google has dropped from either excessive interlinking between sites or participating in "link farms" has caused me to spend as much time monitoring my link partners as building new links.

Keep us informed with your progress. I would encourage you to start again immediately on a new domain. One of my first sites was banned from Google - the reason the site was banned was from prior to my purchasing the domain. Despite the best of advice and communications to Google - the site continues not to be included in the index. I waited several months hoping that I would be able to get Google to add my site back in their index or at least let me know that it was not going to happen before, I started over.

Let us know what you decide -

KSA · 09-08-2005, 10:05 AM

Hi Guys,

I wanted to jump in here to defend the template sites.

Even thought I know it's not a popular thing to do.

I know that a custom site is a great alternative, but a lot of agents don't have the budget to do a custom site.

I work with a lot of agents, and quite a few of them have Point 2 Agent sites. I also am aware of a lot of Point 2 sites where the agent has not changed the standard text - even on the home page.

I personally have never seen or heard about a Point 2 site banned for duplicate content. I would take Keys to Florida's advice and look for other issues.

If you have the budget to do a custom site, that's great. If not, don't abandon the template sites just yet.....

Kathleen

HHI Golf Guy · 09-08-2005, 02:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KeysToFlorida

John,

I spent some time reviewing your site. Here are a couple of my observations:

Great observations!