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The best solution available for SEO and listings is SEO RETS. The company that programmed it was an SEO company that focused on real estate long before they ever started working with listings. RETS is vastly superior to IDX. You can read about it from NAR. It's also easy to up sell because agents know RETS exists, they just never had an opportunity to use it. SEO RETS literally brings the listings and creates pages on the wordpress site. It's a plugin. It comes with very developer friendly tools that let you drag drop "featured properties" widgets, the shortcode is remarkable. You can create a page like "water front" then do shortcode to display only water front in that board. It works on neighborhoods, cities, everything... The only draw back is it's not in every single board in the nation; however, you can call them. If you have enough clients in a particular board, depending on board fees, they might be willing to move in to the board.
From a developers stand point. It's the best cause it is unlimited customization. You get a broker on the program then the agents. Each agent wants pages on their page to display certain neighborhoods etc... You as a developer can use seo rets shortcodes etc to add them as a service (landing pages). Agent press works GREAT with SEO RETS. (pensacolarealestatesales.com). Agents can even use RETS in blogs and the rets feed will keep the blog up to date. If they do a blog today on foreclosures on the market, RETS will update the blog... forever to the most recent foreclosure. It won't leave old dead listings on the blog. Furthermore, the service comes with an easy blog in the wordpress blog area that lets agents add properties by mls, area, etc...
Call them, tell them Joseph gave you their number. Seorets.com
I hope you get on with them and have as great of an experience as I have had.
There is some misleading information in this topic. "RETS is vastly superior to IDX" does not make sense. That's like saying "Wordpress is superior to CSS". Any good IDX provider can, and does, use RETS. RETS is just the standard that a lot of MLS's use to provide their data. If your MLS provides a RETS feed, then IDX Broker, Diverse Solutions, etc will connect to that RETS feed, pull out the listing info, do some formatting, add some functionality, and provide it on your website, using their own IDX solution.
There is no such thing as saying "I'm not going to use IDX, I'm going to use RETS".
I think part of the confusion is that the plugin Joseph is recommending is called "SEO RETS". It is possible the plugin called "SEO RETS" is the best solution (I've never heard of it until now), but RETS itself is a standard that all IDX providers use.
http://www.ExpandingDesigns.com – Custom WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework.
I completely agree ED'. I chose to focus my attention on only part of Joseph's post that I found misleading.
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DP-Yes, I went with dsIDXexpress Pro WP Plugin, which seemed to be on par with IDX broker for what I need, and the most bang for the buck with limited CSS effort as you point out.
DP/ED For context, I have been working with WP for years for my own sites and am building a new site for my wife-she's the agent. By day I'm an inbound marketer/sales enablement guy. Appreciate your trained eyes on the real estate specifics.
IDX Broker Platinum uses subdomains and them maps them to your domain. That is a bad process. It's going to cause duplicate content on google. Since the data originates on their site, you will be the one with duplicates. Since there are multiple agents on their service in each board they arn't going to rel="canonical" your site cause there will be multiple agents in the same board. IDX Broker can't rel all of them.
I don't know what DiverseSolutions is offering, but if you are going between the two for wordpress plugins IDXBroker will have issues on it's hands in the long run.
DP, you can check duplicate content at copyscape.com. I didn't go far to find that you are already duplicating several sources. I didn't log in to see how many.
Joseph, that is not true ( I'm not intending to sound rude). There is no duplicate content.
With IDX Broker, your subdomain uses a CNAME to point to the IDX servers. So your domain might be http://www.josephlee.com (this is where wordpress lives) and your idx pages, landing pages, property details, etc, are all on property.josephlee.com.
Look at the site http://www.waterpointerealty.com/. (this is not my client, I'm not trying to promote myself, I saw it on an IDX Broker webinar this morning).
http://www.waterpointerealty.com/ - wordpress
http://idx.waterpointerealty.com - where all the idx pages live
Now go to Google and type this:
site:waterpointerealty.com
You will see 80,000 indexed results from both the WordPress pages and the IDX pages.
There are no duplicate issues.
The solution you are promoting may be better, I have no idea, but IDX Broker certainly is not a problem. There are many, many people running successful websites using it.
http://www.ExpandingDesigns.com – Custom WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework.
Type site:idx.waterpointealty.com.
The pages are indexed there too. That is called duplicate content. Is every page in the subdomain canonical redirected to the parent domain? I don't think they are.
I am not promoting a product. I was comparing seo rets to idx broker. You started to try and point out off point items. I am looking at duplicate content warning in MOZ on that site.Ed, that is a nice site. Everytime I see uber menu I miss it. Since I started using genesis I have not used it.
Joseph, you misunderstand.
Site:waterpointerealty.com includes pages from BOTH the primary domain and the idx subdomain NOT duplicates of the same page (some with and without a subdomain). Scroll through the results and look at the URLs.
Redirection is irrelevant in this case because there is no attempt to combine the subdomain and primary domain. The WordPress pages are on one subdomain (www) and IDX pages are on the other (idx). The same property page does NOT exist at both http://www.waterpointerealty.com and idx.waterpointerealty.com. It only exists on idx.waterpointerealty.com.
http://www.ExpandingDesigns.com – Custom WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework.
This is not the new IDX Broker Platinum? You are right, I am misunderstood...
Is this IDX Broker Platinum?
I was told by IDX Broker Platinum the listings would provide SEO benefit to the parent domain by being present on the domain. If they don't push them with domain mapping to the parent domain there is no SEO benefit. Anyone that links to a property is not backlinking to the domain.
What happens if the property goes off the market, how are they handling the absence of a once existent url? If there are links passing juice to the url then it dies...
Social Media passes nothing through subdomains and google is becoming more involved with social media.
I paid my $99 this morning to idx broker. I need a product I can use when I can't use Seo Rets. They are only in like 90 boards but growing. I do stuff nationally.
IDX Broker is still in beta though. Setting up a domain map program shouldn't be impossible. It's necessary though. I mean indexing pages is the name of the game for immediate results; however, gaining backlinks gets the site ranked higher when it does index. Do you know what I mean?Ed you know a lot about platinum, do you develop with the product?
I clicked your link Ed, dumb question. However, you are the first developer I have seen that uses FW not DW. I'm not a lone. Perhaps next time we hit the forums in a post we can both defend FW. As I know a couples... million devs that would bash it LOL
Joseph, I appreciate you concern but until whatever it is you are concerned about has negative impact on SEO, lead generation and return on investment I will stick with what I have.
And in my case my domain is HickoryRealEstate.com, my IDX Broker content is at the www subdomain on their server. It appears seamless to most, and google indexes plenty of it each day. Google also serves up plenty of it as 1st place and 1st page results for long tail keywords searches. I love them for doing that.
Esse quam videri
IDX Broker Platinum handles the subdomain the same way as the older version of IDX Broker.
They do provide benefit to the primary "domain" but not necessarily the primary subdomain. Everything is indexed under yourdomain.com. But remember that "www" is a subdomain, just like "idx" is. (www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com could be two separate sites if you wanted them to be) So when you link to a WordPress page, you're building link juice to your "www" subdomain. When you link to a property, you're building juice to the "idx" subdomain. So in some ways, it's like optimizing two different sites that happen to look the same.
What IDX Broker was telling you is basically that if you do site:yourdomain.com you see results from both "www" and "idx". It used to be that your site might be at http://www.yourdomain.com and your idx pages were at yourdomain.idxbroker.com. The way it is now, they are both on your domain, but on separate subdomains.
When a property goes off the market theres a page that says "sorry this listing has gone off the market" or something like that.
http://www.ExpandingDesigns.com – Custom WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework.
Joseph, just make sure you let them know you want Platinum. Platinum is actually still in Beta and most of their existing users have not made the switch. There's no need whatsoever to use the old. It's good, but Platinum is better. By the way, I commend you for choosing this product.
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DP's site is a good example of "www" being a subdomain of its own. He's using "hickoryrealestate.com" for wordpress and then using "www" for his IDX subdomain. You can name the subdomain whatever you want "idx", "search", "properties", etc...
The only reason I don't like using "www" is because if someone adds "www" to one of your WordPress links it will 404.
http://hickoryrealestate.com/local-market-experts-serving-the-greater-hickory-metro.html - this works
http://www.hickoryrealestate.com/local-market-experts-serving-the-greater-hickory-metro.html - this 404s because its trying to look for the page on IDX Broker's server, since you CNAMEd "www" to the IDX servers.
There's certainly nothing wrong with that method, and it makes a cleaner looking URL, I just prefer to use something like "idx" or "property" and use "www" for WordPress.
http://www.ExpandingDesigns.com – Custom WordPress websites built on the Genesis Framework.
ED, I thought long and hard about giving up www for that reason. And, if you have a lot of indexed content out there using www I would not recommend it at all. When I first got IDX Broker I used "search" as my subdomain to avoid visitors clicking www indexed content from landing on IDX Broker's not so soft and not so friendly 404 page. After a couple of years I had no virtually no www legacy content left indexed out there, so I switched when the move to Platinum made my "search" subdomain obsolete. It was fairly easy setting up redirects to handle the indexed "search" clicks and land the at the new www search page.
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I want to make sure we all discuss this as what is best for clients/ourselves. Not so much proving which product is better.
Using www. as the subdomain is a bad idea. The first thing you do when you start SEO'ing a site is redirect the subdomains to the main domain. If you use www. to list your properties, doesn't that still leave duplicates of your actual pages.
example.com
The issue is not duplicate content. The issue is that people can now link to the www. and the example.com versions. This can slow down ranking.
I have been using SEO RETS for awhile. I can tell you that from extensive experience, the competition levels for long tail keywords is almost never enough to require page rank. Realtor, Homes, Trulia, and Zillow typically rank first page and give me a run for my money.
I see that as a big draw back; however, because of that your site does have a few major advantages I was overlooking at first. Most ranking is by SEO. Few people ever really link back to the sites. When they do, the link is discounted as Panda spam by google unless it's a major PR site; which, they understand subdomains etc... Your site's structure (internal link) is perfect. It's getting indexed on every single listing w/o bringing the page rank on your main site down. I admit, when you have the listings ON your site (literally) you can pull too much PR out of page easily if you don't know what you are doing.
Those are two observations from looking at it from the standpoint of an SEO.
DP, make sure you sign up for google webmaster tools and tell google which domain you prefer (the non www.)
Joseph, once again I appreciate your concern. I use the option that says let google decide and they get it right every time. They have not once indexed my wordpress content using the www subdomain. Never.
BTW, long tail searches that return indexed off the market listings (detail pages) land on a page that uses the global wrapper. I have no problem that arrangement. They need to be looking for something else anyway 😉
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