Blackwell wrote a pretty good blog about Trulia widgets, and what they're doing to help Trulia beat us all in the SERPs.

Take a look at it here.

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

I hope that a lot of people will see both Eric's posts. It is really a shame that agents are helping companies like trulia rank well in search engine results.

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Carolyn Gjerde-Tu

Davis CA Real Estate
Granite Bay Real Estate Sacramento Real Estate

I blogged about it too; anything anyone can do to increase awareness!

PS. Just noticed that Trulia is now knipping at my heels for my main target keyword. They are just under me. *insert mean face*

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Steve Castaneda, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
The MyHomeHouston Team

Specializing in Houston Real Estate. Feel free to visit my Houston Real Estate Blog or read about Real Estate Technology for agents.

If I remember, I'll put up a blog post about it tonight, as well. Anything to help y'all out.

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Nicholas May | Creative Linking | Real Estate Webmasters

Thanks for the info. Did not even realize what Trulia was until I read this. They are ranked 12 for my market which doesn't put them on the first page yet but they are still ahead of me.

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Ryan Tollefsen
Prudential Jack White Vista Real Estate

Alaska Real Estate | Anchorage Real Estate | Alaska Market Snapshot

My anti trilia (yes I spelled it wrong on purpose) rants at AR have been deleted because I guess they don't like to be told they are fools for helping out the enemy. Some people are too frickin stupid to realize the more they link to the big guys the lower the rest of us real estate agents are going to rank on the serps. They won't be happy till all of us are paying $10,000 a year to advertise on trillia, realter.con homz.con etc...

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Coastal Delaware Real Estate Sales
REHOBOTH BEACH CONDOS | REHOBOTH BEACH REAL ESTATE | REHOBOTH BEACH MOBILE HOMES
* Results not typical. Individual results may vary.

22% of their profile is from automatically placed widgets on Number1Expert sites.

http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=3119

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

Yahoo currently shows Trulia with 484,527 external backlinks, and according to one of Eric's posts, number1expert is responsible for ~11,000 of them, so that's 2%, not 22%.

And also keep in mind the obvious: quantity of links doesn't give you the whole picture. For example, a page like "http://www.margarethenkel.com/MyHomeDtl.asp?HomeID=569514&P=20" isn't going to pass much juice.

Another thing is Yahoo reports the number of pages linking into trulia, not the number of links. For example, a number1expert page like "http://www.margarethenkel.com/myhomes.asp" has 3 links to Trulia. So are we talking 11,000 or 33,000 links?

That said, if you use Trulia widgets I'd follow Eric's advice and either take down the widget, remove the links to Trulia, or at least nofollow them. It may not seem like a big deal, but since Trulia is SEOed to rank for every conceivable real estate term under the sun, as more and more people link to Trulia, it will obviously become harder and harder to outrank.

I have no clue what number1expert people are thinking. Is Trulia paying them? Are those paid links?

Lastly, when many people are conditioned to start their RE search from Trulia (like people now do on Google for generic searches), ranking #1 on Google will be meaningless.

Half -

These are the yahoo link searches I ran:
1) For Trulia's Total Link Count = 164k
2) For the links automatically placed on the myhomedtl pages of N1E = 25,200
3) For the original 11,200 that I found on the myhomes.asp pages = 11,200

Total links from N1E = 36,400
Divide by total Trulia links of 164k = 22% and change

I think that Google will remain the biggest portal for people to start their search, so I think that the SERPs are going to stay pretty important (until Google Base comes along.)

We're trying to get to the bottom of the N1E links - whether or not they're paid.

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Eric Bramlett

Take your blogging to the next level. PM Me For a Free Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog on YOUR URL!!!

Austin Real Estate | Austin Texas Real Estate | Austin Condos

The million dollar question