Real Estate Listings are duplication of content?

[bobrock4]

The real estate world in the Web is often made by listings published from a real estate agent on several real estate portals at the same time.

Often it happens that the real estate agent doesn't know where this listing has been really published and he could find the listing on unknown portal. This because one portal talks with another one exchanging content with themselves.

Im following a portal dedicated to rentals of home (home page PR0). Until now I haven't seen any progress in Serp nevertheless some optimizations I have already done, so I'm thinking about its content. Listings of my portal are taken from another "master" portal (home page PR2) and they are also published on a third real estate portal (home page PR2). These two ones are better positioned in Serp.

The content of the listings is the same and also categories are the same, but pages of this websites are different in other aspects.

Question is: could the portal that i'm following be considered as made by duplicated content, so Google is not giving to it good positions in Serp?

Thanks and ciao

[netmeg]

Real estate is notorious for that. Listings are duplicated over and over and over. Personally, I don't know how anyone (other than Zillow) does real estate via organic search.

[Shepherd]

Real estate is a tough nut to crack. I think the first thing to keep in mind is not trying to get listing information to rank.

The real estate agent's world and the seo world are polar opposites. The agent wants the listing plastered on every website possible to attract leads. They have no regard for the duplicate content issue this creates.

If you are doing the seo your probably going to want to restrict google's access to the listings on your site and then work on finding other, unique content to rank for.

[LifeinAsia]

work on finding other, unique content to rank for.

Agreed. The same MLS description is going to show on dozens, if not hundreds, of sites. The agent could write their own unique description of the listing then link to a no-indexed page that contains the full MLS description.

[bobrock4]

Thanks to all for your replies.

Serp in my country have top positions taken from some big competitors. So they're doing SEO. They have lot of links, some of them are positioned as we do for e-commerce websites (I did something of similar), some local ones are emerging for local keywords.

My idea is that they're doing lot of things to be there.

Content? Links? Social signals?
Some optimizations on the page I think we need to do it.

Ciao

[linkbuildr]

For our clients we sprinkled in location based real estate social media such as area tweets, local yelp reviews, embeded video of the area/home and other things. Made it "unique" enough to see quite a good jump for our clients who had it setup....well so far going strong a couple of years now.

[rish3]

For our clients we sprinkled in location based real estate social media such as area tweets, local yelp reviews, embeded video of the area/home and other things. Made it "unique" enough to see quite a good jump for our clients who had it setup....well so far going strong a couple of years now.

I think this is spot on. For the most part, anything you can put on the page that's unique, and adds value, helps the visitor, and probably also helps the page rank.

The better real estate sites I've seen do things like:

• Listing recent sales within some radius of the home
  
• Further expanding on the above by calculating $/sq foot for nearby homes and showing if the listing is in line with other, real, sales.
  
• "Going deeper" than other sites. For example, most sites will show the school district for the home. Other sites go further, and show the specific elementary, middle, and high schools. Others go further still, and add in academic performance ratings for each school, or distances to each school, or nearby private schools, etc.

[Planet13]

There is SO MUCH information that a LOCAL real estate site could have that the nationwide sites don't have.

The people who own those local sites just don't want to put in the effort to make them really valuable to potential buyers.

Seriously: Think about what would be truly important to potential buyers once they move in to the area.

[bobrock4]

Thanks to all for your replies,

Local SEO is a good advice. I'm now seeing some limits in the present vision of my website. Its mission is to publish listings all over the country, even if until now there are in most regional ones.

Could it be the time to think it locally instead of as the whole country view? Should I take local web marketing ideas and put them in my web marketing plan?

I have found here a social activity for the site made with a automatic publishing of all listing on twitter and facebook. They are dozens of real estate listings every day. I think these are social signs not usefull for web marketing and for seo. Nobody is putting like or sharing these listings. I'm thinking to cut them off..

Anybody thinks about SEO classical actions as title, h1, breadcrumbs or these ones could be no more useful in this environment?

Thanks

[particleman]

Within the last year I wrote a real estate site for a local realtor in my town. It was a unique opportunity as they were willing to pay for a custom site to consume their RETS data feed. I analyzed some of the larger realtor sites to see how to best set it up. The key was to organize the listing in a hierarchy of State > Zip Code > County > City. This is directly visible in the URL also. By doing so all of the listings are logically grouped on pages one would expect to find. So searching for "Homes for sale in X county" or "homes for sale in <city>,<state>" would land on the correct page of the site. These specific pages range reasonably well for their region of listings. Google did not seem to mind the duplicate content it seems as their listings show next to the big players, realtor.com, zillow and others.

[webcentric]

I'm a big fan of the locality approach, e.g. drill-down url as particman suggests and from there, getting original, locally relevant content on the page that, in this case would expand on primary subject matter which is local real estate. I created a highly-successful real estate site for a local realtor several years ago and just putting a bit of local flavor into it worked wonders. Listings aren't the only way to attract clients. Often, people want to search a target area for listings. Focusing on the locality can bring people to the listings. I'm no SEO guru but I do work on sites based on locality primarily and know from experience that the bigger picture about a locality attracts people to content focused on the details of that locality, e.g. specific real-estate offerings.