So I was on the net today looking at the online reputations of major real estate agents just for research. I am talking major players. I came across one agent who is a trainer and an agent on the West Coast. He has two real estate websites. One is a blog that he has not touched in the past year and the other is a new site he just launched with 4 blog posts from earlier this month. Setting aside the fact he does not actually own his website, in reviewing the posts, it was a no brainer for me that he did not write these posts. After additional research it was obvious this was content being provided by his website provider.
If your website provider is posting content to your site you have to be careful because this content could also be posting to hundreds of other websites within their platform. It is really easy to research. Look at the post and copy a unique sentence from the post like “As the events of the last few years in the real estate industry show” which I found in a blog post I reviewed and you will see this blog post is sitting on many other sites. Follow this link to see the results.
MOZ states, “Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original—or best.
Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their index
Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results
When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses, and search engines provide less relevant results.”
Google wants original content in your blogging. You can hyper-local blog about current events or breaking news. You can blog about new listings before they go into the MLS. Blog posts can be short and sweet. The search engines would like to see at least 2 blog posts per week. Consistency is the key. Real Time blogging is also important.
If you have no time to blog you can hire a professional blogger but be be careful as I have seen issues with hiring overseas bloggers. Imagine having an overseas blogger write about a new restaurant in Texas and featuring a photo from Hong Kong. That happened.
Blogging needs to be one of your best friends and being so busy that you have to use posts on a hundred other sites is no excuse if you want to do it right.
CJ Hays – Follow me on Twitter
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