I was speaking to Drew Meyers today from the Zillow team about some new data they have released via a creative commons license that allows you to map neighborhoods (Always on the looking for cool new data sources) and naturally the subject came up of current Realtor (Especially REW members) perception of Zillow.

I was saying to Drew that from my perspective, there is not a lot of benefit to us real estate webmasters from contributing our information or data to Zillow as we end up building content for what is perceived to be a competitor for SERPS in the long run. And of course I happened to mention that there are no SEO benefits to participation in Zillow either - He was quick to point out that there are do follow links available via the profile pages, but ALAS no link love is passed due to the fact that none of them are spidered. So I say to him (If you do manage to make them spiderable, I would like to be the first to know, as good real estate related links are always welcome )

But coming away from the call - I realized that even with do follow links that contribute to link popularity for our sites, the negative feelings Realtors seem to have towards Zillow might stop them for submitting either way.

So I put it forth to you members - if there was an SEO benefit to creating a profile at Zillow, would this change your status as a participant, or would you continue to boycott based on the principal of helping the competition amass content?

*Disclaimer - I do not do any business with Zillow, am not in talks with or doing any business with Zillow, nor am I posting this for any other reason other than curiosity Drew is a pretty nice guy though - I was probably a little hard on him here in the forums lol

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It was great getting on the phone with you today -- I was glad to learn more about REW and its clients. I just wanted to post a quick clarification to one thing you said --

The correct quote would be that not ALL profiles pages are spidered. However, many of them have been found through links from other parts of Zillow (such as zillow discussions threads). I actually set up a google co-op search module to search profiles on Zillow, so I think you can pretty easily check to see if your profile is spidered by searching for your name here. But that said, we're definitely working on improving the way Zillow profiles are spidered by search engines.

And don't worry about being too hard on me in your forum - I can take it. Just know I'll return the favor when you come visit Zillow Discussions

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Drew Meyers
Community Relations Specialist, Zillow.com
GeekEstate Blog
Carnival of Real Estate

You are correct - what I should have said was "In the few profile pages that I checked, I could not find evidence of a cached profile page" - my bad

With regards to being hard on me back - heh that's cool (Although the intent of my comment was to admit I "was" to hard on you lol) <<< Smiley maybe meant sarcasm?

Anyways - it was great to speak with you as well, like I said, you genuinely seem like a nice guy, and I have to admit, Realtor feelings or not - some of the technology and data sets you guys produce are quite impressive.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

My profile has not been spidered

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Sunnyvale Real Estate
Santa Clara Real Estate
Cupertino Real Estate

The way I look at it, in order to maximize your online presence, you have to be found in as many places as you can. The problem is, you are only 1 person, so you have to use your time efficiently as your primary job is to sell real estate. So if Zillow is not providing any SEO benefit, then it might not be worth your time setting up a profile. On the other hand, Zillow does get a tremendous amount of traffic, so that could out weigh the lack of SEO. But going back to your question, if there is no SEO benefit, then I would say "No".

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Las Vegas Real Estate <> Real Estate Networking <> Las Vegas Real Estate Blog

we've had a profile for some time (showing 94 views) but aren't indexed yet.

I would have guessed that we should/probably would have been indexed given that we've uploaded a number of listings over the last several months and have 'zillow pointers' to our profile.

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Eichler | Marin Real Estate | Marin County MLS

I'm showing a link from Zillow. You have to participate in a couple of discussions, and then the spiders find their way to your profile.

Zillow would have to give away more link juice to entice me to participate more. One link from the profile is worth what I gave it - enough time to set up a profile & answer a couple of questions in the discussion.

Quite honestly, I don't see any agents/brokers ever getting much from Zillow (beyond links) so I don't see them getting any natural participation. I actively participate in REW b/c I'm able to genuinely learn & contribute in a great environment. I'm sure I could contribute a lot @ Zillow, but I don't think I stand to gain anything.

Zillow is definitely a competitor - no question about it. They're a competitor in the SERPs, for brand awareness (vs. Realtor,) and for mindshare.

They're trying to provide a Q&A that already exists in a non-commercial enterprise - city-data.com. I don't have time for city-data right now, but if I did, I know I can pick up clients there through participation. The people you find on Zillow are already looking for alternatives to Realtors, and Zillow is definitely commercial (and the consumer smells it.) I guess what I'm saying is that if I was out trolling for clients, I'd rather do it at a non-competitor site that I believe the consumer has a higher (less commercial) regard for.

I know that Zillow is trying to dive into the user-gen content arena, I just think it's going to be an uphill battle.

Best advice for Zillow? Buy Activerain - it's for sale, and there are already lots of active members. Or see what they want for city-data.

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Eric Bramlett

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One other point...not to be too hard on Zillow, but this shows how much PR is being pointed at the profile pages (not much.) If you have to actively build the links to your profile page, then there is no natural internal linking to your profile page - you're better off from an SEO perspective, IMO, setting up an offsite blog somewhere and do-follow commenting or forum commenting around w/ the sig links pointing back at the blog (quality comments, of course.)

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Eric Bramlett

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Eric,

Out of curiousity, do you think Zillow represents the same 'competition' as trulia?

Personally I think Trulia is more of an all around threat (in terms of SERPS). I don't see Zillow posing the same SERP threat since I think they will have a tough time getting fresh listing data 'en masse' from brokers similar to how Trulia has been able to convice some of the largest brokers to 'open the spigot' and help beef up their listings database.

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Eichler | Marin Real Estate | Marin County MLS

Mine is Indexed. Search NU Home Source

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