TRIBUS is in the real estate brokerage website vendor business, and we talk to a lot of brokerages and look at a lot of websites. I recently came across something that did not sit right with me, and I bet real estate brokerage owners across the country have no idea that they are being scammed out of free search traffic from sites like Google, where 90% or more of all homebuying searches begin. Today we will discuss the one thing a real estate brokerage website vendor should never do to their customers.
How It Should Work
Before describing the problem, let’s discuss how Google ranks your site in the first place. Google reviews your website periodically, sometimes daily based upon the size of your site, to learn about what kind of business you are, and what type of content you offer. Real estate brokerage websites are particularly good at telling search engines they are about homes for sale and real estate in their local market, due to all the real estate listing details they provide, with each page having addresses, cities and keyword-dense content, which search engines love. Bonus points are awarded for some technical design features, such as having a secure website, plus proper use of H1 tags, alt-tags, and other techy things.
The Bait…
OK, got that? Now comes a brokerage website vendor offering a platform with bells and whistles, and all you have to do is buy a budgeted amount of search engine marketing, or pay per click (PPC) advertising. So, the broker/owner thinks, “This sounds great!” A low-cost website and paid advertising to drive traffic. And I guarantee your paid traffic will seem like a gift because there is virtually no organic, or natural (read: “free”) traffic coming to your website.
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…And Switch
And here’s where the sucker punch comes in. The brokerage website vendor may have coded your site to tell Google not to read it and learn about your company. They actively told search engines to, “move along, nothing to see here.” They used something called a “noindex” tag.
How To Tell If You’re Being Scammed by Your Brokerage Website Vendor
To see if your brokerage website has a noindex tag, and if you use Chrome as your browser, right click anywhere on your homepage, and choose “View Source” and a new tab/page will open with the code used to build your page. See below for how to do this:
Once your source code is revealed in a new tab, you want to find if the “noindex” tag exists. From your browser menu, click EDIT > FIND AND REPLACE.
In the FIND field, enter “noindex” and search.
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If you find code that looks like this (this was not from Zephyr’s site used above), you’ve got a problem:
That “noindex” code tells the search engines to NOT index your site. As a result, search engines don’t “learn” about your content or business, and therefore customers cannot find you in the search engines.
Why Would This Happen?
Why? Why would a vendor do this? Think about it this way— if you’re getting free traffic from your website, why would you need to pay for traffic from the vendor? In these scenarios, the vendor provides a low-cost brokerage website so they ensure you don’t get free traffic and consequently rely on the vendor for any web traffic. These tactics make their results not only seem impressive, they falsely suppress free traffic to do so.
Conclusion
As a firm that works with brokerages to maximize their organic SEO value via legitimate methodologies, I find this practice underhanded at best, deceitful at worst.
Buying PPC traffic and websites from the same vendor is not automatically a bad thing, and I’m not accusing all vendors of engaging in this behavior. But if you are a real estate brokerage buying PPC traffic from your website vendor, do yourself a favor and determine if your website is actively blocked from being indexed, preventing free traffic from coming to your website. If you confirm this behavior, the next step is up to you. I know what I would do.
