Galen Ward, co-founder of Estately.com, a Seattle real estate brokerage, first brought to light the ongoing conversation about Trulia’s questionable optimization techniques in an article at BloodHound Blog. The article raised many eyebrows and started a flurry of criticism and the birth of a massive campaign titled Trulia Awareness to educate unsuspecting non-internet savvy agents and broker/owners that Trulia may be a modern day version of the Trojan Horse.
Most internet savvy companies would not accept, even as trade, supplying content for another company’s website for traffic and exposure when the receiving company does not give credit back to the original source of content by hoarding page rank.
They might be better served by hiring SEOs and investing in their own websites and arming them with the very tools necessary to give the consumer what they want, and compete directly with the competition for their share of internet traffic.
The crux of the controversy is that Trulia receives its content in the form of real estate property listings from trusted partners (i.e., real estate agents and real estate companies) and displays these listings on their real estate site. Through a clever process, Trulia employs technical maneuvers such as “nofollows,” temporary redirects, etc., which essentially makes the original source of the information invisible to Google, thus allowing Trulia to outrank the original source in the search engines.
Trulia’s strategies have worked in positioning itself on the first page for many “city real estate” searches:
Further investigation shows Trulia dominating long tail searches as well.
Galen Ward gives the example of Trulia dominating the search results for 714 West Culver Street.
Trulia has also created widgets for agents to place on their sites. These widgets are some of the best creations to ever emerge from widgetland. Most agents are not aware that these eye candy tools are also an incredible link-bait campaign.
Trulia widgets are coded with “follow” backlinks to Trulia, while Trulia “nofollows” links from its site. Admittedly, very, very clever. To be fair, Trulia does provide a follow link from the agent’s profile page if they create one.
An Inman News article, Trulias’s web ranking strategies catches heat, reports that Peter Flint, CEO and Co-Founder of Trulia, responding to criticism, noted in a a blog post that Trulia does not plan to change its linking practices. “We don’t remove the “nofollows” because it could negatively impact our ranking and it probably won’t help yours. Obviously not a smart business move for us today.”
While I do not profess to be an SEO expert, I did learn the hard way about link manipulation to improve ranking in search engines via a penalty from Google last year, and Rand Fishkin wrote about my site in his post what-it-looks-like-to-be-lost-in-googles-real-estate-reciprocal-link-penalty . A large number of real estate and non-real estate sites were penalized for this penalty.
From Google Guidelines, “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your sites ranking,” “links intended to manipulate Page Rank,” and “Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.”
Per Google, the “nofollow” tag was created for blog comments as a “way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, track backs, and referrer lists.”
Is Trulia is claiming that the source of their content is from spammers? In other words, does Trulia trust the content, but not the source?
Here lie my questions to Rand, Mozzers, et al:
- Do you believe the use of “nofollows” and redirects could be used to deceive Google into ranking a site higher in the search engines over the true source of the content?
- Do you believe it could be engaging in aggressive link manipulation of page rank?
- Do you consider this web ranking strategy to be black hat?
- Do you believe this to be a vulnerability for the “nofollow” tag?
- If you answer yes, what do you think Google’s action should be?
A blog post on Active Rain reports Trulia has received over 17.5 million dollars in venture capital. Trulia’s venture capital partners include (most importantly) Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley icon who originally funded Google $12.5 million of seed money through partner Michael Moritz. Mr. Moritz was one of the key players in making Google what it is today.
To be clear, Trulia does not strong-arm agents and brokers into giving them content — they do so willingly. Some companies are “preferred partners.” The real estate industry has not kept up with the times and Trulia offers an alternative to Realtor.com.
Real estate agents and broker/owners always have the option to demand that Trulia change their linking practices or stop sending them content. Most internet savvy companies understand this. Unfortunately, most real estate agents and broker/owners are not internet savvy.
Simply put, it is Trulia’s web ranking strategies that have many claiming foul.
Note: June 11th was my 1 year mozz-i-versary. I have learned so much this past year and I thank each of you for sharing your expertise.
