Selling Real Estate in a Duplicate World

In a recent tutorial on what not to do when creating website content, Google guru Adam Lasnik chose to single out real estate sites. All blame and potential unpleasantness aside, Lasnik answered a question I've been thinking about for a while: How closely is Google watching the real estate web community? The answer now seems to be, "Okay, you wanted our attention - you got it."

Lasnik was actually just trying to be helpful, not passive aggressive. His post was for those of us hardworking, honest webmasters who still can't seem to avoid tripping up Google's nebulous Duplicate Content algorithm from time to time. He wrote,

"Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. This means not publishing (or at least blocking) pages with zero reviews, no real estate listings, etc., so users (and bots) aren't subjected to a zillion instances of "Below you'll find a superb list of all the great rental opportunities in [insert cityname]..." with no actual listings."

Whether we're talking about listings, area information pages, or service packages, duplicate content is a big issue in real estate, and the Googlers know it. And I'm just talking about sites that don't mean to steal or reproduce copy. For a discussion on content theft, and some of the accused, check out this old thread on REW.

Unfortunately for us, real estate websites are about as common as oyster shells, and nowhere near as varied. For every good site, there are probably 50 carbon copied bad ones. That's one problem in itself - the other problem is the industry's often generic nature, and the challenge of providing things like home prices in a standardized format with which people are familiar. Those are our excuses, and luckily, the search engines are sympathetic, to a point.

There's been a wealth of speculation and experimentation about how the major search engines, Google in particular, deal with duplicate content. Most of it is unhelpful, some of it very unhelpful. The reality is, there may never be any hard and fast rules when it comes to duplicate content. The stated goal of Google's algorithms is to find the "best" version of a document, which necessarily allows for all kinds of duplication. Exactly how much, and how it is weighted, is of course, undisclosed.

For Google, trying to find the "best" version has caused a number of additional problems. In one potentially unfair scenario, if a site publishes a document, it can end up getting bumped in the rankings by a more authoritative site that copies the same document later. On the other hand, this rule has to be there (to some degree) so that when I publish the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Library of Congress will outrank me when it gets around to publishing them as well.

As it turns out, both MSN and Yahoo have taken measures to give credit to sites which publish a document first. Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy shed light on this topic for SEO Chat last year. The MSN/Yahoo solution doesn't allow me to outrank the Library of Congress for "dead sea scrolls," but it does allow a Realtor to outrank any competitors who steal his content. Unfortunately, as Sullivan found, Google is much less sophisticated in this regard.

For all the mystery surrounding Google's algorithms, it turns out old-fashioned human eyes are a big part of its duplicate content strategy. Google makes no secret of its worldwide army of "quality raters." These are people paid to browse search engine results at home and flag "offensive" any sites in conflict with Google Spam policy. The most common offenders are affiliate sites with sneaky redirects and no original content. Oh, and the occasional real estate site. As reported by Search Engine Round Table in 2006, quality raters leave a search referral string with feedback for Google on many sites they visit, shown in site analytics as: https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=XXXXXX.

Chances are it's a good thing if you see one of those strings in your analytics. It means an actual person has gone through and verified your site as "not spam." Unfortunately if you want to learn more by accessing the string, you'll just get a "Forbidden" error.

While it's nice to know Google occasionally uses people to check content, it's also slightly concerning. If they can't come up with a solid algorithm for duplicate content soon, their quality raters won't be the only ones second guessing search results. But until then, I'm choosing to be glad that legitimate real estate websites are getting close attention. Of course, if I was stealing a lot of content for my sites, I might be less glad.

• Deftly Dealing with Duplicate Content

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