Category: Blogging

Historical Content Retention(HCR) With Real Estate Websites You Own

Many of you know my stand on website ownership vs renting your real estate website. It all boils down to owning your online assets and the SEO value of your Historical Content Retention(HCR).

Blogging needs to be a real estate agents best friend. In a perfect world, you are blogging on a WordPress website you OWN at least twice a week, if not every day. As long as you stay with WordPress, you can always upgrade to new sites and the content you created will will stay intact with any images, videos, dates and the URL it was indexed on.

As a real estate agent actively blogging, if you are renting your website that has a blog and you choose to buy a new real estate website, you may end up throwing away the historical SEO value of your prior active blogging. And in fact, every time you change websites, the search engines have to re-index your new site and this can lead to essentially starting over with a blank slate in the search engines.

I was with one of the first companies that brought WordPress to real estate. Ease of content creation, maintenance, SEO attractiveness and blogging was and still are strong points with having a WordPress real estate website. Then about 4 years ago, new companies started offering cheap monthly rental websites with blogging technology. So many of you created pages and pages of content over a period of years and at the moment you choose to go with another site, you are told there is no easy way to import your prior content into your new site.

But you thought your website was built in WordPress and you just purchased a WordPress website. The site may have been built with the same base php technology, but if your dashboard does not look like this, you are out of luck.

So if you buy a WordPress real estate website and you want to bring over your months or years of content from a site that does not have this backend, you will have to manually reenter your posts. Your valuable history will be gone. All of this content including the images will have to be re-indexed. Not a good scenario.

All I am asking you to do is think about where your content is being posted. Do you have full control of that asset? Is your content exportable if you change site providers? Will your historical content retention be up to date?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to talk you out of your amazing PPC or Paid Leadgen website. All of these leads you are paying for have to go through that vendor’s online process, some of which are off the hook. I am just advising you to think about placing your unique personal content within a technology you own and control.

Do not use real estate blogging services providing duplicate content

So I was on the net today looking at the online reputations of major real estate agents just for research. I am talking major players. I came across one agent who is a trainer and an agent on the West Coast. He has two real estate websites. One is a blog that he has not touched in the past year and the other is a new site he just launched with 4 blog posts from earlier this month. Setting aside the fact he does not actually own his website, in reviewing the posts, it was a no brainer for me that he did not write these posts. After additional research it was obvious this was content being provided by his website provider.

If your website provider is posting content to your site you have to be careful because this content could also be posting to hundreds of other websites within their platform. It is really easy to research. Look at the post and copy a unique sentence from the post like “As the events of the last few years in the real estate industry show” which I found in a blog post I reviewed and you will see this blog post is sitting on many other sites. Follow this link to see the results.

MOZ states, “Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original—or best.

Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their index
Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results
When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses, and search engines provide less relevant results.”

Google wants original content in your blogging. You can hyper-local blog about current events or breaking news. You can blog about new listings before they go into the MLS. Blog posts can be short and sweet. The search engines would like to see at least 2 blog posts per week. Consistency is the key. Real Time blogging is also important.

If you have no time to blog you can hire a professional blogger but be be careful as I have seen issues with hiring overseas bloggers. Imagine having an overseas blogger write about a new restaurant in Texas and featuring a photo from Hong Kong. That happened.

Blogging needs to be one of your best friends and being so busy that you have to use posts on a hundred other sites is no excuse if you want to do it right.

CJ Hays – Follow me on Twitter

#CJ4marketing