Real Estate Internet Technology

Protecting your website domain from squatters

Author: Dave Halliwill

I had a rude awakening a little while back with my folks website, remericasomersetrealty.com. I stumbled onto a similar site, remericasomerset, without the realty on it. It was obviously someone who had nothing to do with Remerica, or Somerset Michigan personally. The site is basically full of paid links to surprisingly legitimate sites. Whether or not they know where their advertising dollars are going (I assume the motive for the owners of the site to promote them is money coming from some where) is a mystery, though I would think not for some of them.

Some of the site I saw at a glance on the page included:

homegain.gom
realtor.com
mollymaid.com
dice.com

Pretty surprising to me, and I wish I knew what more to do about it.
Here's the info on the site owner. West Indies! Surprise Surprise.

Registrant:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. (REMERICASOMERSET-COM-DOM)
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
+852.30164984
message@keywordmarketinginc.com

Domain Name: REMERICASOMERSET.COM
Status: PROTECTED

Administrative Contact:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. message@keywordmarketinginc.com
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
Fax- +852.30164984

Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Keyword Marketing, Inc. message@keywordmarketinginc.com
P.O. Box 556
Main Street
Charlestown, West Indies
KN
+852.30164984
Fax- +852.30164984

Record last updated on 03-Jun-2008.
Record expires on 02-Jul-2008.
Record created on 02-Jul-2007.

Domain servers in listed order:
Name Server: DNS1.DNSSERVER6.COM
Name Server: DNS2.DNSSERVER6.COM
Name Server: DNS3.DNSSERVER6.COM

Being Dropped from Google Really Hurts

Author: Dave Halliwill

Well, I've read alot about the horrors people have at being completely dropped from the Google index, and now I've experienced it first hand. The site is remericasomersetrealty.com, and doesn't even come up in the index at all when I search on "Remerica Somerset Realty". Previously it was number one (obviously). Google has always advertized that certain tactics are a no no and can get your site banned. Of course if someone hacks your site and is up to no good then the last thing they are worried about is keeping your site in good stead with google. Thats what happened to me. What they did was to plant an encryption that unpacked itself when executed, and displayed about 40 or 50 hyperlinks on the site. Only the hyperlinked text was non-existant (Nothing between the <a> and </a> tags). And they displayed it with a style tag attribute that basically said "nodisplay", so you can see in on the rendered page, but its in the source code. The idea is that these link get picked up byt the search engines and thier ranking goes up. I didn't catch it for a acouple of weeks and paid the price. I suspect, however, that if google is dropping my site for hosting the bad code, I doubt they are giving much love to the sites in the links either (though I did notice that THEY weren't dropped completely). I only wish that google wouldn't make the complete assumption that the code is the intentional work of the site owner. I have my site registered with google analytics and google webmaster tools. A simple email saying "your site may have an issue and you may want to check it" would be nice. Maybe they should update their algorythm to say "if (host == ipower) { bogus_code_source = "hacker"; }

Edgio Closing and CodeMash

Author: Dave Halliwill

I received an email from Edgio the other day that said that they were auctioning off their website. I'm not sure what it means but it could mean that they may not be around much longer. If so no more posting ads there.

On the technology side, the other thing I wanted to do was to plug the 2nd Annual CodeMash Down i Sandusky Ohio. They had a lot of great presentations last year, and it seemed like a fairly cutting edge affair to me. Pretty cool water park too. Here's my little plug for them:

CodeMash

Gauging the Housing Blues from Wall Street Journal Headlines

Author: Dave Halliwill

I get the Wall Street Journal and I enjoy reading it. It's a great newspaper. But lately I've been so busy, I haven't been reading it much. Al I have tiem for is to skim the headlines. Lately there have been more and more headlines about the Housing market and Mortgage Crisis. After reading these headlines daily for the last few months I feel like I know all about the Housing situation, or atl least where it's going. So I thought I'd share a few Wall Street Journal Headlines to make the point. Here are some recent ones and a few from earlier this spring. Skim them and you'll be up-to-date on all the latest housing and mortgage doom and gloom.

Data On Housing Suggest Bottom Hasn't Been Hit
Page A2
March 21, 2007

Finding a Mortgage in Tougher Times: Turmoil in Subprime Market Hits Home as Terms Tighten For Some Borrowers; Better Deals for the Prime Segment
Personal Journal
March 22, 2007

Regulators Scrutinized in Mortgage Meltdown: States Federal Agencies Clashed on Subprimes As Market Balloned
Front Page
March 22, 2007

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae pledged to buy tens of billions of dollars of new subprime mortgage loans over the mext few years to help prop up the market.
(What's News - Business and Finance)
Front Page
April 19, 2007

Debt On Sale: Banks Grease The Leveraged-Loan Machine
Money and Investing
October 10, 2007

Big Banks Push $100 Billion Plan To Avert Crunch
Front Page
October 13, 2007

Citigroup Model Is Left Shaken By Credit Crunch
Front Page
October 16, 2007

Burned by Real Estate, Some Just Walk Away
Personal Journal
October 18, 2007

Credit-Market Fears Flare Despite Upbeat Earnings
Money and Investing
October 18, 2007

Interest Rates Defy Fed's Recent Cuts: Credit-Market Crunch Keeps Yields Relatively High on Savings, While Home-Equity and Some Other Loans Remain Pricey
Personal Journal
November 6, 2007

Morgan Stanley May Take Hit From Subprime
Money and Investing
November 7, 2007

Dump this House: Unloading your Property in a Slow Market
Personal Journal
November 7, 2007

Get Set for Wave of Debt Downgrages: With Investors Frazzeled, Real Estate Softening, Three Rating Firms Have Their Markers Out
Money and Investing
November 9, 2007

Dividend-Cut Anxiety Rises as Banks Wobble
Money and Investing
November 10, 2007

Credit Pressure Filters Down To Muni Market: Bond Insurers' Exposure To Troubled Mortgages Ripples Through System
Money and Investing
November 16, 2007

If Homne History Repeats, Then Look Out
Money and Investing
November 20, 2007

Have Companies Feasted on Debt? Ask Smithfield
Money and Investing
November 21, 2007

Mortgage Mess Curtails Wagoner's Honeymoon
Marketplace
November 21, 2007

Mortgage Giant Fuels Worries With Steep Loss: Setback at Freddie Mac Is Worse Than Expected; Its Shares Plummet 29%
Front Page
November 21, 2007

Rising Rates to Worsen Subprime Mess
Front Page
November 24, 2007
For Banks, the Hurt Just Goes On: Options for Financing Drying Up in Europe; Short-Term Rates Jump
Money and Investing
November 26, 2007

Citigroup Feels Heat To Modify Mortgages: Nonprofit Groups Press For Subprime Relief; Deciding Who Gets Help
Front Page
November 26, 2007

Stocks Sink Into Correction As Credit Fears Take Toll
Front Page
November 27, 2007

HSBC Becomes First Bank to Bail Out Troubled SIVs
Money and Investing
November 27, 2007

Home prices dropped 4.5% in the third quarter from a year earlier, while consumer confidence waned in November (What's News - Business and Finance)
Front Page
November 28, 2007

Subprime Sword Claims Morgan Stanley's Cruz: Heir Apparent Joins List of Wall Street Casualties; Was Polarizing Style a Factor in Her Ouster?
Money and Investing
November 30, 2007

U.S., Banks Near A Plan to Freeze Subprime Rates
Front Page
November 30, 2007

Borrowers Tap Mortgages Of Last Resort
Personal Journal
December 5, 2007

How the Credit Crunch Turned Local
Money and Investing
December 6, 2007

Is Tech Bust A Blueprint For Builders
Money and Investing
December 6, 2007

How Subprime Loan Mess Hit Poor Immigrant Groups
Front Page
December 6, 2007

Battle Lines Form Over Mortgage Plan
Front Page
December 7, 2007

How Hot Land Sales Offset A Housing Glut in Phoenix
Marketplace
December 7, 2007

Countrywide isn't out of the woods yet. Since a credit crunch……
Money and Investing
December 7, 2007

U.S. Mortgage Crisis Rivals S&L Meltdown
Front Page
December 10, 2007

Did Authorities Miss a Chance To Ease Crunch? Sec, Spitzer Probed Bear CDO Pricing in '05, Before Backing Away
Money and Investing
December 10, 2007

UBS's Subprime Hit Deepens Credit Worries: Bank Gets $11.5 Billion From Singapore, Others; 'Unknowable' Bottom
Front Page
December 11, 2007

Fed Cuts Rates, Seeks New Ways To Thaw Credit
Front Page
December 12, 2007

How Accurate Is Subprime Forecaster? Critis Say Index Tracks A Too-Narrow Portion To Sway Write-Downs
Money and Investing
December 12, 2007

Why Borrowers May Not Benefit From Rate Cut
Personal Journal
December 12, 2007

Some Lending Pressures Ease, a Bit
Money and Investing
December 13, 2007

Central Banks Launch Effort to Free Up Credit: Fed Extends $40 Billion In Bid to Revive Lending; Europe, Canada Weigh In
Front Page
December 13, 2007

How Goldman Won Big On Mortgage Meltdown: A Team's Bearish Bets Netted Firm Billions; A Nudge From the CFO
Front Page
December 14, 2007

Posting Homes For Sale on Geebo

Author: Dave Halliwill

Well I checked out geebo.com and put in a listing there. Here's my experience with that. I wanted to look at the listing again before I wrote the post, but had a rough time finding it. On geebo you log in, or otherwise validate, with a password (no id), but I didn't see anywhere I could log in to check my current listings, and I didn't see where any link was sent to me via email. So I had to scroll through everything posted for Detroit for three days, which boiled down to 20 or 30 screens.

Geebo doesn't let you put html in the description, but if you put in a web page address, geebo will recognize it as a link and hyperlink it for display. However, even though they preserve the actual link, the link that is displayed is only the base url of the website. So, for example, to put the page address for listing number 149 in a geebo ad, I type the following url: http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/149.html. When geebo displays the ad, the link looks as follows: http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com
Notice that what you see is the front page address, but the actual link if you click on it is the link shown above; 149.html. I thought that was a little odd.

The other thing about geebo was, when you surf through the listings, the info that is displayed in the lists doesn't include the title, so there's no good abreiviated description of the listings. myhouseinfo.com has a similar weakness. Additionally, as with so many of these sites, geebo is limited to major cities, so it doesn't cater well to rural areas. I did like the simplicity of the input screen. Geego is not exclusive to Real Estate.

Posting Real Estate Listings on Oodle

Author: Dave Halliwill

I know I haven't written in a while and the summer (and half the fall for that matter) got away from me. I notice though that my .net guru buddy hasn't written all summer either though, so I feel better.

I said that I would check out some more Listing Posting sites a while back, so I checked out oodle this morning. Here's what I found. It looks like they have an affiliation with Lycos so you can post to both places, but as far as I could tell, it looks like you have to enter the posting in both places also. The software is similar but not identical. The main problem I saw with oodle was that, once I registered it assumed that I was the contact for the listing, and wanted to use my email as the addrss to reply to. Something craigslist allowed for along time ago was no reply address, and you specify the contact info in the classified. The nearest city I could post too was Detroit, which is at least 75 miles from my folks real estate area in Southern Michigan. Backpage still has this downfall also, but Craigslist has added Ann Arbor, and more recently Jackson, which is very close. Also oodle didn't allow me to specify a half bath, I didn't like having to select "real Estate" twice in the screen clicking process. It did let me specify a website address for the listing, but then it didn't hyperlink it for me. They could hyperlink it with a nofollow. I might post more to oodle in the future but it wouldn't be my first choice.

How do you add a hyperlink and other html to a craigslist listing ad

Author: Dave Halliwill

I have Google Analytics for a couple of my websites, and I finally added this reporting feature to my blog. For those of you that aren't familiar with Google Analytics, its a free service that allows you to view some amazingly diverse statistics for you website and all you have to do is put a small amount of javascript in your blog template or index file for your website. Anyway, as soon as I added this reporting capability I noticed that one search that brought someone to my blog was for "how to add hyperlink to craigslist ad". I thought that was interesting since I don't know that I had ever explained how to add a hyperlink, or any other html to a craigslist ad, even though I do this often. So here's a brief overview on how to add hyperlinks and other basic html to your craigslist.org post. These can also be applied to backpage.com. Some sites allow html and some don't so you'll have to experiment.

I always add my extra html markup to the description field. First, I'll explain the hyperlink, which I think is the most important since you can provide your own site with some nice inbound links this way.

here's an example of the syntax for a basic hyperlink for a listing:

<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/lakeproperties.html">
South Central Michigan Lake Homes and Properties
</a>

note that that actual web page is specified, but the text that will show up as hyperlinked on the rendered craigslist or backpage webpage is South Central Michigan Lake Homes and Properties

For more on the correct syntax for hyperlinks see http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

Here are some more simple examples of html tags for basic formatting,

to display this - type this
--------------------------
This is bold - <span style="font-weight: bold;">This is bold</span>
italic - <span style="font-style: italic;">italic</i>
carriage return- <br>


Other examples of values of the style attribute for a span tag that you may want to read up on are:
color: blue;
font-size: medium;

Here's a larger example of what you can do.
It's some html that I inserted into a recent craigslist add. Note that some of these tags are deprecated, meaning that they may be obsolete in future versions of html, and you'll want to look into specifying them as style attribute values of span or div tags in the future. I'll leave that lesson out here for simplicity.

<b>
<font size="+1">
Remerica Somerset Realty
</font>
</b>
<br>
Somerset, MI 49281<br>
517-547-6525<br>
<img id="plain" src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/rsr-email.bmp">
<br>

<table>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/277.html" title="Click here for Details on 11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_11125__Waldron_Rd-Jerome-MI-49249-437.jpg" width=150 alt="11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/277.html" title="Click here for Details on 11125 Waldron Rd, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
CRYSTAL LAKE, MI LAKEFRONT WITH LAKE LEANN, MI ACCESS</a><br><font size="-2">THIS DISTINCTIVE CUSTOM DESIGNED HOME OFFERS A MEDITERRANEAN CONTEMPORARY STYLE HOME COMPLETE WITH A GATED COURT YARD TO THE ENTRANCE AND A PORTICO DE.....</font></td>

<td align="right">$669,000</td>
<td align="right">5,566</td>
<td align="right">5.08</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#FFF5F0">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/230.html" title="Click here for Details on 10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10500_Somerset_Rd-Somerset -MI-49281-138.jpg" width=150 alt="10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281" >

</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/230.html" title="Click here for Details on 10500 Somerset Rd, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
LAKEFRONT HOME 50 MINUTES FROM ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN</a><br><font size="-2">THIS SPECTACULAR WATER FRONT HOME IS SECLUDED FROM THE ROAD BY A RIDGE OF PINE TREES AND HAS STUNNING VIEWS LOOKING OUT TO THE MAIN LAKE FROM A QUIET .....</font></td>
<td align="right">$288,000</td>
<td align="right">2,424</td>
<td align="right">0.19</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>

</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/252.html" title="Click here for Details on 10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10650_Glendalough-Somerset-MI-49281-259.jpg" width=150 alt="10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/252.html" title="Click here for Details on 10650 Glendalough Ln, Somerset, Michigan 49281">
WATER FRONT HOME FOR SALE 50 MINUTES WEST OF ANN ARBOR, MI</a><br><font size="-2">EXCEPTIONAL 1.29 ACRE YARD WITH 62 FEET OF SANDY BEACH ON THE LAKE IN A QUIET BAY WITH MAIN LAKE VIEWS. MATURE AND TREE SHADED YARD WITH SCREENED GAZ.....</font></td>
<td align="right">$254,000</td>
<td align="right">2,080</td>

<td align="right">1.29</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#FFF5F0">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/241.html" title="Click here for Details on 10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_10770_Arrowhead_Circle-Jerome-MI-49249-345.jpg" width=150 alt="10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249" >
</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/241.html" title="Click here for Details on 10770 Arrowhead Circle, Jerome, Michigan 49249">
WATER FRONT HOUSE FOR SALE IN SOMERSET CENTER, MICHIGAN</a><br><font size="-2">SPECTACULAR VIEWS. RANCH STYLE HOME WITH FULLY FINISHED WALKOUT AND FRONTAGE ON PRIVATE ALL SPORTS SOUTH LAKE LEANN. DOCK YOUR BOAT AND ENJOY THE FA.....</font></td>

<td align="right">$199,000</td>
<td align="right">2,240</td>
<td align="right">0.26</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor="#F0F5FF">
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/181.html" title="Click here for Details on 14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233">
<img src="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/images/listings/thmb_14175_Tralee_Dr-Somerset-MI-49233-153.jpg" width=150 alt="14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233" >

</a></td>
<td>
<a href="http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/listings/181.html" title="Click here for Details on 14175 Tralee Dr, Somerset, Michigan 49233">
LAKE ACCESS HOME NEAR PARK, 20 MINUTES SOUTH OF JACKSON</a><br><font size="-2">THIS SUPERB HOUSE IS BUILT INTO THE SIDE OF A SMALL HILL AND REACHES SKYWARD WITH A TWO STORY ENTRANCE AND FOYER. NEAR MAIN PARK AND HAS OUTSTANDING V.....</font></td>
<td align="right">$164,000</td>
<td align="right">2,003</td>
<td align="right">0.34</td>
<td>Hillsdale</td>

</tr>
</table>

The rendered ad then looks something like this:


Remerica Somerset Realty
Somerset, MI 49281
517-547-6525

	CRYSTAL LAKE, MI LAKEFRONT WITH LAKE LEANN, MI ACCESS THIS DISTINCTIVE CUSTOM DESIGNED HOME OFFERS A MEDITERRANEAN CONTEMPORARY STYLE HOME COMPLETE WITH A GATED COURT YARD TO THE ENTRANCE AND A PORTICO DE.....	$669,000	5,566	5.08	Hillsdale
	LAKEFRONT HOME 50 MINUTES FROM ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN THIS SPECTACULAR WATER FRONT HOME IS SECLUDED FROM THE ROAD BY A RIDGE OF PINE TREES AND HAS STUNNING VIEWS LOOKING OUT TO THE MAIN LAKE FROM A QUIET .....	$288,000	2,424	0.19	Hillsdale
	WATER FRONT HOME FOR SALE 50 MINUTES WEST OF ANN ARBOR, MI EXCEPTIONAL 1.29 ACRE YARD WITH 62 FEET OF SANDY BEACH ON THE LAKE IN A QUIET BAY WITH MAIN LAKE VIEWS. MATURE AND TREE SHADED YARD WITH SCREENED GAZ.....	$254,000	2,080	1.29	Hillsdale
	WATER FRONT HOUSE FOR SALE IN SOMERSET CENTER, MICHIGAN SPECTACULAR VIEWS. RANCH STYLE HOME WITH FULLY FINISHED WALKOUT AND FRONTAGE ON PRIVATE ALL SPORTS SOUTH LAKE LEANN. DOCK YOUR BOAT AND ENJOY THE FA.....	$199,000	2,240	0.26	Hillsdale
	LAKE ACCESS HOME NEAR PARK, 20 MINUTES SOUTH OF JACKSON THIS SUPERB HOUSE IS BUILT INTO THE SIDE OF A SMALL HILL AND REACHES SKYWARD WITH A TWO STORY ENTRANCE AND FOYER. NEAR MAIN PARK AND HAS OUTSTANDING V.....	$164,000	2,003	0.34	Hillsdale

Click Here to see this ad in it's natural habitat, but keep in mind that the ad expires in 45 days.

How much do Search Engines remember old keywords and links?

Author: Dave Halliwill

This article isn't about Real Estate necessarily, as the ideas discussed can really apply to any web page, and optimizing it for search engines, but I'll use examples and lessons that I've learned from working on my folks Real Estate website to illustrate my theory.

When reading about Search Engine Optimization - methods for making web pages do better in search results - I've come across alot of comments that indicate that you should refresh, and otherwise update your content frequently. In response to this, I began to update the page titles for my folks listings on a regular basis, changing the keyword "house" to "home", "acres" to "acreage", and "lake front" to "water front" for example. Now I figured also that, since the search engines don't crawl and process at exactly the same time, that it might increase the odds of coming up in results for a wider variety of keywords. For example, if Yahoo crawls a listing when it says "Lakefront Home 30 Minutes South Of Jackson, MI", and then I change the title to "Water Front Property 60 Minutes West of Ann Arbor Michigan", and Google crawls the page, then between two search engines I've just associated the page for that listing with the following key words:

Lakefront
Home
South
Jackson, MI
Water
Property
West
Ann Arbor Michigan

Cache Keyword Smearing

Now have you ever noticed when you get search engine results in Google and you click on the cache instead of the actual website link, it shows you keywords on the page highlighted, but also words that don't even appear on the page, but rather are present in links that point to the page. Well that got me thinking that if Google is keeping track of keywords for that page that aren't even on the page, then aren't keywords that used to be on the page also data about the page that isn't on the page? In other words, just because I take the term "Real Estate" out of the title, possibly that history still helps Google weight the page - at least for a while - a little stronger for the term "Real Estate", even after the word is gone, especially when the page still says "Real Estate" in three other places.

Admittedly this "sticky history" idea is just a theory of mine, but as well as my folks humble website has done locally against many bigger players, it's one of my theories as to why. Since I haven't seen any reference to this idea out there yet, I'll call this Cache Keyword Smearing. I may be behind as I haven't had much time to read lately, so if anyone has read any other articles on it let me know.


Natural Link Smearing

Now if you like to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) like I do, then your probably familiar with the term "Natural Link", which means that you put a hyperlink behind some text, but also typically the text of a paragraph, or some other larger stream of thought or communication. When you link that way, search engines - assuming everything is above board - tend to associate those keywords that are linked with the web page that they point to. So, if for example, I say I have one sponsor on one of my websites that has a really cool tool for helping people with arthritis open pill bottles , then the keywords tool, helping, people, arthritis, open, pill, and bottles all become associated with that site in any search engine that finds that inbound link.

Well back to Real Estate. I created an RSS feed for our listings, and this is what made me realize that I needed a "title" since title and article body tend to be two key fields in rss, and atom for that matter. For those people not familiar, rss and atom are two xml based standards for sharing data across the Internet. Anyway, I decided while I was at it that I might as well create two "titles" instead of one, since it wouldn't be much harder. Then I could use one title on the actual listing page, and in the page title, and use the other title for the rss feed. Now when most rss sites display an rss item, its typical (and courtesy) to hyperlink the title back to the actual page on the original site. So now I have some natural linked keywords out there on some rss feed sites with extra keywords that may or may not overlap the keywords in the page title. Finally, I go in to the listings every so often and swap the titles once in a while. I think of this as Natural Link Smearing.

What does a search engine do when title keywords and link leywords keep disappearing and reappearing? Would a search engine like Google actually remember the old title and link keywords and continue to weight your page on them to some extent, even after it's read the new keywords? What does it do when it sees these link and title keywords being swapped? Only the folks at Google know for sure, but with all the talk about the sand box - and the delayed effect getting stuff into Google, why would the logic work any different at getting stuff out?

My Favorite Real Estate Listing Posting Sites

Author: Dave Halliwill

Well, I've been meaning to write more about great sites to post listings on, and rate them, but in order to do it you have to do some homework and it takes a little time to post on a bunch of different sites. Well, my folks recently received a really nice luxury lake home and I really wanted to help them promote it, so I was out hoofing it in cyberspace as it were, trying to help them promote this particular listing. In the process, I revisited quite a few real estate posting sites, and I thought that I'd better do my critique now while they were fresh in my mind. I've tried to list them as much as possible in order from most favorite to least favorite, and list what I like about them and/or didn't like. All of the basic services on the sites below is free.

craigslist.org - Well, for a while craigslist was on my back burner list as I'd had some problems with them, but I tried them out again the other day and the listing I put in was fairly easy to do an worked quite well. Great features of craigslist include:
- They get lots of traffic
- They don't require a userid or password, just your email address
- Their listings are all exposed to the search engines
- They allow for some html in your description, including links to your listing on your own
site, and you can use natural linking , which mean you can hyperlink keywords, which
is important.
- craigslist also has an rss output feed, further increasing the potential for the distribution of your listing, but it only provides titles, no detail. craigslist isn't specific to Real Estate.

backpage.com - backpage is fairly similar to craigslist in most ways except that they probably don't have quite as much traffic as craigslist. Also they don't have quite as many Michigan cities as craigslist, and really only list major metropolitan areas. One thing that is better about backpage though is that they send email renewals allowing you to renew your listings, where they expire on craigslist and you'd have to repost. Also their rss output feed appears to have a bit more content than craigslist. backpage isn't specific to real estate.

trulia.com - I haven't really tied to post to trulia manually, but fortunately they specify an xml format that they will accept, so if you can write a routine to output the data in the proper xml format, you can load your listings to trulia automatically. Whats even better is that, once they have the address of the xml page on your website, they will hit the page regularly and automatically update you listtings on their site based on whats on your site. My hats off to trulia for this setup. With more of this going on on the Internet, traditional MLS systems beware. Trulia also has a strong mapping system. Trulia is a Real Estate only site, and also has an rss output feed.

edgeio.com - edgeio, like trulia also allows you to provide a web address of an edgeio custom xml version of your listing content, and also automatically refreshes it. I had some trouble getting this working recently, and couldn't find the support link on their site, but when I posted her on my blog they read it the next day (gee, someone reads my blog) and helped me right away the next day. edgeio isn't specific to Real Estate.

base.google.com - google base is another site that allows you to load all your listings via a custom xml feed. Unlike trulia and edgeio however, google will expire your listings every 31 days and forces you to manually reload them. If you have the software written to produce the xml file then its only 10 minutes work a month to reload your listings to google base. If you forget to do it they'll still expire and dissappear though. I wish they set thiers up like trulia and edgeio and refresh it from my website directly. One cool thing about google base is that it will give you stats on how often your listings arte being displayed and viewed. trulia and edgeio may have that feature and I just haven't noticed yet.

expo.live.com - I tried expo a couple times recently and had pretty good luck with it in terms of ease of posting. expo live is microsofts answer to the classified website market. They don't appear to allow for any bulk xml uploading just yet, but I did insert a listing manually and it was quite easy. They allow listings to be marked as "cool"similar to Digg, have some interface to facebook, and they show recent posts on the main page. They also show you recent listings you've view after you log on. I don't think they allowed me to put in any link to the actual listing though. I'll have to check out expo live further before I can say too much more about it, but its worth a look.

re-list4free.com - This was another site that I had good success at putting in a listing manually. It did allow me to put in a natural link back to the original listing, but didn't seem to have search engine exposure, meaning I had to submit a form to see my listings. I couldn't get to them just by clicking.

A few sites that I didn't have good luck with were propsmart.com, cytadia.us, and abetterway.com. propsmart seems to hold alot of promise, and has a strong mapping system, and I've posted there before, but I couldn't get a listing submitted because I was having problems with the zip code, and the latitude and longtitude. It was required, and I lost patience trying to figure it out. cytadia and abetterway just seemed to have to many data fields for me.

Stay tuned next time when I review oodle.com, geebo.com, and more.

Auto publishing listings to Trulia, Google Base, and Edgeio

Author: Dave Halliwill

I had set up xml based publishing feeds some time ago in order to submit listings from Remerica Somerset to Trulia and Google Base. While neither worked like magic, I recall having more trouble with the Google Base format (lots more) than Trulia. Trulia also automatically hits the address that you give them periodically to refresh your listings. Google on the other hand, makes you load a file from your desktop (as far as I can tell) and then expires all you listings and forces you to manulally reload them every 30 or 45 days or something like that. So, needless to say, I like the way Trulia is set up better.

Anyway, I digress from what spurred me to this article. I was surfing around Edgeio the other day and realized, or remembered, that at one time I had worked on feeding listings to that site also, I believe using rss, but I recalled that the info was spartan with basic rss. It looks like what they have now allows for more data, so I set up a listing feed and tryed to load it. The two main errors that I get that I don't understand are

[error #104.010] error: Published time of the listing was not defined
[error #110.212] error: Unable to determine listing's location

I used the tag and followed the RFC2822 format by using the date('r') fnction from PHP, but it still doesn't like it. I'm not sure what it wants for location, as I followed the category tags for city, state, country, and zip that they specified.

What really surprized me about Edgeio though, was that I could find no way to contact them on the site in order to get assistance with the problem. There appeared to be administrators, but their email was hidden. So I guess for now I'm stuck in my quest to add listings to Edgeio

Oh what a tangled web... of Real Estate Listings we weave

Author: Dave Halliwill

In working on listings for my folks site, I came across trulia.com some time ago. This is a site where you can automatically provide a feed in xml format, and assuming that your site is capable of dynamically refreshing the feed when trulia hits it, your listings will always be on Trulia, and always be up to date. Google has a similar xml input feed you can provide to their Google Base, but unfortunately they expire your input every 30 days or so and you have to go and give them a new file manually, so it's not quite as nice as Trulia from my perspective.

Anyway, while working to load listings to Trulia, I noticed that some of our listings were already there from a site called point2homes. This is a site that's done by the same company (I think - don't quote me on this) that does the Remerica Corporate website, and will give agents a personal page in point2homes for an additional $10 per year, and load their listings in.

Now my mother had already mentioned to me sometime back that she had problems with duplicate listings at realtor.com. That's because being at the corner of three counties we put our listings into three separate MLS systems, all of which feed into realtor.com. I'm not sure if realtor.com fixed this problem yet or not, but all of this got me to thinking about all the different places I've seen these listings being sent to and from. I wondered if other realtors were experiencing similar spaghetti journeys with their listings, or even knew where their listings were headed in cyberspace.

I thought I'd leave you with the following graphic to emphasize this crazy interconnection of listing sites. If this is the future of Real Estate Listings on the Internet, then two questions come to mind.
1.) How are we going to prevent duplicates?
and
2.) what will be the future of the MLS sites if the listings are so freely available everywhere?

Food for thought, or something like that.

5 Questions To Ask About Your Real Estate Web Site

Author: Dave Halliwill

I attended codemash in Sandusky Ohio a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite good. Hats off to my friend Darrell Hawley for doing a great job with the registrations. I particularly liked "The World is Dynamic"keynote presentation by Bruce Eckel. He had lot's of photo's from Burning Man and made an analogy between the art projects that folks undertook there and software projects.

Anyway, codemash got me thinking about what technology information I could relay to interested real estate people. While most of what was presented there was highly technical, I decided that there were still plenty of simple tips that I could be sharing with real estate professionals who might not be internet savy. So without further delay, here are 5 things to ask yourself about your real estate web site.


1. Are your property listings search engine exposed?
That might sound like you need to take your site's clothes off, but what I'm really talking about is, if a search engine spider such as google finds your home page and reads it, can it find the links to take it to all your individual property listing pages. The litmus test to find out is, if you surf your site, can you reach your individual listing pages from the main page just by clicking your mouse, and without typing anything, then your well exposed. If you have to type in criteria and press a submission button, thats a form submission, and search engines will have a tough time finding those listings.


2. Do your listings include a title or short description, and are your page titles optimized for them?
Having a short title thats displayed in a slightly larger font than the main description can really allow the search engines to better determine what your page - and your listing - is all about. It also allows you a spot to emphasize geography or other special keywords that may not be supported by standard fields, such as "Home Near Golf Course For Sale In Somerset Township". Ideally, if this short title is what shows up in the title bar for the page, then it will be the main header on search page results. *Technical Note: Whatever text is between the <title> and </title> tags when the page is displayed constitutes the page title, and its also displayed in the bar at the very top of the browser window.


3. Does your real estate site provide or allow for original content?
Just as cash is king in the real world, content is king in cyberspace. If you purchased a real estate website from someone, and the only content thats provided is listings from an MLS feed, then you can bet that those listings are also being displayed to many other sites. You need something to differentiate your content. If you can easily add articles and other local commentary or information, then you should take the time to do so, and update or add to it periodically. Also, there are so many good blog softwares on the internet now - I use blogger.com - so writing on a blog site and then publishing it back to your real estate site is another possibility . Ask your real estate site provider if they support rss or atom feeds from other sites.


4. Does your site have any inbound links?
Does your website provider network your site so that other sites have links to it? Are those links good natural links, meaning does the text thats hyperlinked say "yet another real estate website" or does it say "best homes for sale in Jackson County"? Hopefully you get the idea. If you post listings on other free classified sites like backpage and craigslist, you can create your own natural links back to your own site. I'm planning a more detailed article shortly with more detailed descriptions of real estate posting sites. (Note: I used to be able to post natural links on craigslist, but I had an odd note from them recently and haven't had time to check it out, so if anyone finds out otherwise, let me know).


5. Is your email address sufficiently hidden?
Just as it would presumably be desirable to get as much exposure for your listings as possible - items 1,2 and 4 - your email address is another matter. You really don't want to have your email address exposed in plain text on the internet, and if it is, you'll know what I'm talking about already. If your email address can be read off of a page, then sooner or later the spammers will get ahold of it, and you'll be bombarded with junk mail, or spam mail. One way to get around it if you want to advertise your email is to use an image of the address. type it up in microsoft paint, crop it, and save it as a jpg or gif file. Thats not 100 persent safe, since wandering eyes can still read it and abuse it, but it cuts down on junk mail alot. Another solution that most folks are familiar with is to provide a text box for people to submit a message to you. I'm not personally fond of that method - it seems so impersonal and one way - but it does allow people to email you without subjecting your address to spammers.

I hope these tips help to improve your real estate website and sell some property for you.

Housing Statistics in the Wall Street Journal Today

Author: Dave Halliwill

There's not much of a technology focus in this article, but significant enough to be worth mentioning.

The Wall Street Journal came out with some housing statistics today (October 9th), complete with graphs that visually demonstrate the tremendous shifts in the market over the last couple of years. It's worth taking a look at the charts if you can get a copy of todays journal. Here are some of these numbers:

Existing Home Sales for August: 6.3 Million - down 12.6% from previous year
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

Median Home Price for August: $217,590 - down 1.8% from previous year
That's DOWN, not UP!!
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

Housing Starts for August: 1.67 million - down 19.8% from previous year
(Source: Commerce Department)

Supply of Homes as of August: 7.5 months - nearly three months longer than the previous year according to the Journal. That means it would take 7.5 months to sell all the homes listed in August, wheras last year it was only around 4.5 months.
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

There are a couple of other numbers in there, but they all indicate a 360 degree shift in the Real Estate market in the last year. For those interested the data is on page C10 (Money and Investing)

Real Estate Investing - Long Term versus Short Term

Author: Dave Halliwill

Up until a year or two ago the Real Estate Market had been doing quite well for sellers for a number of years. Real Estate Prices were steadily climbing across most of the country, and demand from buyers remained strong. This created an ideal market for short term Real Estate Investing, sometimes referred to as "flipping". For investors that know what they are doing, they could often deal in properties with very little of their own money involved, and often make nice profits in a short period of time, mostly from knowing where to go, what to look for, and handling paperwork. Now that the market has shifted so dramaticly, there are - ironicly - more foreclosures available on the market than ever. But there's a problem now with short term investing; you can't be so sure how soon you'll be able to sell it. So if you actually put the title in your name on the deal, be prepared to become a Semi-long term investor for the time being.

For more on this, see the article "How low will real estate go?" by Lacey Rose of Forbes.

Also See the The Real Estate Bloggers for another interesting article about the current real estate market shifts.

The Future of Multiple Listing Services (MLS) and The Internet

Author: Dave Halliwill

In the old days in Real Estate, there were local organizations that realtors congregated to to share their listings. It was a necessity. The Internet was non-existent, and the first computer based systems to share listings were proprietary, and required users to sign up and pay to become members. Thus, the advent of MLS. Many Realtors, especially in rural areas such as where my folks are, still believe that being a member of their local MLS system to get exposure for your listings is a necessity.

I believe that will gradually change, and here are some reasons why:

Cost - MLS Systems charge a significant amount of money, while there are more and more places on the Internet where you can post listings for free - I've mentioned that before and I'll be back later with another articel on my favorite hit list.

Monopoly - May of these MLS systems operate form a business model of "No competition". For example, if you want to deal Real Estate in Hillsdale Michigan youhave to be part of the SWMRIC MLS. Period. Which brings me to my next sticking point. Service. This tends to cause these systems to be less driven to provide better service and site functionality. Some MLS Systems won't allow access to the general public at all, and do things like prevent you from downloading photos.

Discontinuity - With My folks Real Estate Office, they are in a geographic area that requires them to become members of 3 separate MLS systems for 3 counties. Two of those systems are from the same company, so they effectively have to pay twice to use the same software.

Data Feeds - These systems allow members to receive and post all listings on their own personal sites, but I've looked at the format that some of the data currently comes in and its pretty rough. Zipped excel files. XML is they way they need to start going with this stuff to stay competitive. Also, when you sign up, current rules allow other realtors (at least in Michigan) to post your listings next to a nice big picture of them, only crediting that actual listing in the fine print. These are typically public Internet websites and many end consumers don't realize that the real listing agent is way down below in the fine print. Now why would I want my listings in a system like that?

Lack of Search Engine access - Most MLS Systems themselves can't be crawled by search engines, so you won't find listings from MLS systems by looking on Google.

In short, I believe in time - and it may take a while - more and more realtors are going to start seeing and believing in other Internet advertising strategies, and unless local MLS systems get more effective and competitive, they'll either go by the wayside, or get swallowed by the MLS Systems that do a better job of competing.

For an example of how the Internet is slowly begining to fundamentally change the Real Estate Market, see this article by Nick Karris at Gomez.com

Appropriate use of RSS Feeds

Author: Dave Halliwill

Most Realtors know that members of MLS Systems happily subscribe to MLS area listing data and then create websites that display their own information next those listings, only crediting that actual listing agent down at the bottom of the page in fine print. This typically makes the listing appear as if its thiers to those outside the Industry that don't know to look to the fine print to find out who has it listed.

Now along comes RSS, allowing for people to build such pages with similar designs using RSS. But be carefull whose feeds your using. They may not wish to have their content displayed elsewhere on the web, and they may be giving you the entire detail of the articles and not crediting themselves well in their title. This could technically create copyright problems, despite the fact that they published an RSS feed, and I think many folks assume that if a feed is offered, its an open invitation for use. I recently ran into such an issue, even though the content did not involve listings, and didn't serve the same market as my folks business.

Also I wanted to run a little survey, so feel free to take the following

When you see a link to an rss feed on the Internet, in order to use it on your own site you should: Call the source of the feed to gain permission Credit the source with a hardcoded message on your site when the feed displays Nothing - since they control the content, they can credit themselves in the title Both 1 and 2 Add your comment Create Your Question - Worldsentiment

Real Estate Virtual Tours

Author: Dave Halliwill

Its hard for me to believe, but just two years ago, my folks had no website at all for their Real Estate business outside of the MLS sites where their listings showed. Now they have a halfway decent site, but users seem to be wanting/expecting virtual tours more and more. I'll tell you what I've found so far, and then solicit more input.

First, the main virtual tour technique that I've read about doesn't involve "filming". It involves taking still photos - preferably with a wide angle lens - and then using a special software to "stitch" them to gether into one continuous photo. The second step would be to set something up on your web site to "scrool" up and down and sideways on the photo. Of course, many sites and services will take care of some or all of these issues for you for costs that vary.

I'm still researching technologies and best options, and hopefully will have more in the future. I'd greatly apprieciate any input that anyone has on the subject, particular in terms of vendor pricing, and tecnologies for displaying the tours on your site.

RSS Feeds in the Real Estate World

Author: Dave Halliwill

Well, I've worked quite a bit more on both producing and receiving RSS Feeds as they relate to Real Estate, and I'll share a little of what I've learned. For those that may not know much about it, RSS is an XML based standard that allows websites to share content dynamically. Its a set of data format rules that allows websites to retrieve data from each other, and save it or redisplay it - typically in html. It can be a win-win situation for both senders and receivers because it allows poeple to offer their content to be posted elsewhere on the Internet along with links back to their site, and it provides content for people who would like additional content for their site.

First - and I hope you advanced rss guys don't laugh at me - when your trying to produce an rss feed and you look at an example in your browser, don't include the dash marks you see (IE. - ) in your actual output. Thats just your browsers way of displaying it. Also if your trying to write your own rss writer, and are using a reader program to test it, be sure that you force an execution of the writer code file by using the completely qualified domain name, even though the file is on your local machine. This will cause your browser to "serve" your file and force execution of your rss writer.

Assuming your rss writer program can receive a parm called contentkey to determine the content to output in rss formet, put the following entry in your .htaccess file (if your running apache* - as I discussed in a previous article)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^someoutput.rss$ rss_writer.php?contentkey=outputindicatorstring

Next, you can type the following in your browser address bar:

http://www.domain.com/rss_reader.php?source=http://www.domain.com/someoutput.rss

as long as your rss reader program is set up to take a parm called source to identify the rss to be parsed.

Notice that I used the fully qualified domain name for the file someoutput.rss

Thats enough for now. I'll try to come up with a list of Real Estate related RSS Feeds later. I will say that you can go to Yahoo News, and type in the real estate trems your interested in, and then select RSS to tget the address of RSS formated Real Estate News.

*fyi I mis-stated previously and indicated that .htaccess and re-directs were a php feature, which isn't correct. It's actually a feature of apache web server

One other thing to keep in mind when setting up an RSS feed is the amounts of hits you might incur by over zealous rss sites that are looking for news updates every few minutes or so. Be sure to look into the and tags.

Website Directory Submissions

Author: Dave Halliwill

I found a site that gives a really good summary of websites where you can submit your site address to try to get more exposure on the internet. This is a good reference for folks trying to improve their rankings for a Real Estate site, or any other site. http://webseodesign.com/resources/free-directory-listings.htm

Beating the big Real Estate sites at SEO for geographic keywords

Author: Dave Halliwill

One thing I've noticed in trying to optimize my folks site for search engine results, its that there's a whole lot of competition out there when you search on a city and state along with other Real Estate terms. This is true even for towns near where I grew up with vey small populations and limited Real Estate opportunities. It seemes that some of the big players apparently utilize some "post office mailing address" type databases, and generate pages such that they appear to be your Real Estate solution in your loacl town for everything, even though they've never been there. One trick I've found is to focus on geographic terms that may not be available in such a database. When searching on area lake real estate, many of these players drop off, although there are some others that step up to the plate. In my case things like "Irish Hills", which is a geographic area, but the mailing addresses there appear to be local towns in the surrounding areas. Trying to get ranked for searches on county names can also be difficult, but townships appear a little less competitive as search terms. Of course, the trade off is that folks from further away that want to look in your area may only know villages, cities, and counties, so the battle goes on. Getting your site address included on other sites is still important, and having lots of good content too. Also, I found that when you can get links to your site posted, put descriptive words inside the link.

So Hillsdale County Michigan Lake Properties is a good bit of text to hyperlink in my case.

Hiding Ugly URLs

Author: Dave Halliwill

This isn't necessarily a Real Estate related tip, but I've seen a lot of sites that have pages with URLs that expose a lot of parameters, which makes the address hard to read and type, and also tends to make the URL less preferable to search engines, so I thought I'd pass on a tip that a friend gave me recently. I'll give the example for PHP/apache, but you can also do this in other environments, though the specifics might be different.

Lets say that you have an URL such as

www.yoursite.com/entrygenerator.php?id=42

In PHP you can edit the .htaccess file,

and put in the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
Now, you should be able to present the URL as simply www.yoursite.com/42.html

To also support 1 and 3 digit parms you'll need to add the following 2 entries:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1
RewriteRule ^([0-9][0-9][0-9]).html RewriteRule ^entrygenerator.php&id=$1

This technique can also help to improve the security of your site by obscuring certain details such as the real name of the executable file.
Give it a try, and if you have trouble, research mod_rewrite (for PHP/apache at least)

An Overview and Rating of Free Real Estate Posting Sites

Author: Dave Halliwill

Since I first posted some listings for my folks on craigslist.org, it seems some other free posting sites have gotten ahold of my email and been so kind as to let me know about thier sites, so I thought I'd give a rundown of the pros and cons of these sites for folks.

craigslist.org - The presentation isn't real professional but ovverall I'd say it's still the best free Real Estate posting site I've found so far. The site functions very well, and it's intuitive. In addition, you can drill down to all the listings, which means that the search engines can find the listings. In addition, it seems to have some significant traffic, and it allows me to script my own html into the listing entry. Another nice feature of the site is that it doesn't make you register and then remember an ID/PW, but uses your email account for this type of purpose. You click the links in the emails sent to your email account to "confirm your identity". Who needs another password to remember. One of the real drawbacks is that it only lets you get as specific as the nearest major city, which leaves out a lot of geographic areas where Real Estate is concerned.
3 out of 4

craigsworld.org - This one had a real strange interface that I had trouble with. It seemd to want to keep refreshing. Also, when I posted, it came out strangley formatted and I couldn't figure out how to edit it. I did like that fact that it looked like they were trying to keep the posting simple, but I think this site needs work.
1 out of 4

myhouseinfo.com - This site had a real professional look butit assumes I'm the realtor, which creates some issues for me. It also doesn't appear to have any drill down capability, so its likely that the listings are hidden from the search engines. The other thing I noted was that when you search for listings, the resulting list gives no general description, so its hard to tell what you have untill you click on each one. This one might have some potential but I'm not sure of the traffic volume so far. It's worth keeping an eye on.
2 out of 4

local2local.org - This one also has some potential, but I think needs a lot of work. I posted, then had trouble finding my posting to view or edit it. I did find it to edit finally, but it wasn't real intuitive. The screen didn't seem to indicate my logged on/logged off status very well either. Still if they work on it this site might have some potential. It does have drill down capability, and this site also kept some stats on the number of views.
2 out of 4

One big drawback to all of these so far is that most of them that did have the drill down only catered to major urban cities.