What Your Mother Never Told You
Actually, on one is apt to tell you, but real estate Backlinks, especially from sites such as Zillow and Trulia are very harmful to Realtor websites. I wrote previously that Realtors are basically small business owners. Can you imagine a small business owner that is fooled into advertising his competitor’s business? Real estate backlinks surreptitiously accomplish just this.
Real estate agent beware! Backlinks can ruin your website while improving your competitor’s reach.
Zillow, Trulia and Back links
Search engines seek content and popularity. Writing a blog can improve ranking on search sites. Widgets, often offered for free to Realtors, add content that Realtors think consumers may find of interest.
The big boys – Zillow.com and Trulia.com frequently offer free tools – widgets – to Realtors.
A common widget example is the ubiquitous mortgage calculator. The widgets are shiny (Realtors, you KNOW what I’m talking about!). Shiny and free and filled with real estate backlinks. Huh?
Buy what are real estate backlinks?
A backlink quietly connects one site to another. Zillow and Trulia sneak real estate backlinks into their shiny free widgets. The effect of which is, when a consumer visits a Realtor’s website, containing a widget, the big company also gets some extra juice in the eyes of the search engines.
The effect compounds – if your site is drawing visitors and has a widget – the code in the widget is creating real estate backlinks which tells search engines, hey look at Zillow! Or, hey, check out Trulia. Imagine 50 agents, each with a great personal website containing a widget. Each draws 50 daily views. Each site has a Zillow widget with its real estate backlinks. National behemoth Zillow gets 2500 backlink visits from all of those widgets. Suddenly, those 50 views pale next to 2500 hits.
Work Smarter
This is how the big websites continue to grow exponentially at the cost of Realtors who are out there doing the hard work of listing, selling and buying real estate with their clients. Don’t be fooled agents. Zillow and Trulia are good tools. My clients use these services. I’m active on the sites as well. Just don’t be fooled into loading a shiny widget onto your site. You don’t want to promote your competitor at your own expense.
Did you find this blog useful? I value your comment on the subject. And I’m available to talk about your Real Estate Needs – please give me a call.
Great post Bob! Agents seem to be pretty naive about the implications of these widgets. Way to help get the truth out there!
Jeremiah, thank you for reading the post and commenting. Do you have a blog?