Hi, I just got my last paycheck from homes.com, so I am no longer an employee and will now answer any question you guys have regarding the way homes.com does things internally.

All I ask is two links in exchange, one to my marketing website, and another to my former, homes.com site so that I can eventually rank higher than my former boss would never listen to me about how to improve our SEO/SEM on our websites.

Links Displayed Below in my Signature

homes.com ... who wants to do anything they do ..ewww

Perky already did the homework for us about your rank on Google.... which might explain why your boss never listened to you!

Kep, order PowerSearch, then try to cancel. Call Customer Support and see if you get your IDX problem fixed. Order a Design package and see how long it takes for you designer to call you. Order SEO, and see if your ranked in Google three months later.

After you reach your threshold for frustration, come back here and I will give you the direct number of someone who can help you.

Robert,

Not to be rude, but your sites seem quite basic and your PR is extremely low. Am I missing something?

This is a pretty original scheme to solicit links.

Who does an SEO/SEM account manager do, btw? Keep tabs on paid link expenses?

Nope your not missing anything SEO is not about design...I am not so good at design. Those sites are terrible I admit.

Homesinpb.com is just a vanity site I keep online because it ranks higher than my former bosses site at homes.com for "pacific beach ca real estate" "pacific beach ca" "mission beach ca" etc...

Realsanluisobispoestates.com was really just me experimenting with the "open reality" platform and keyword use in the domain out of order. Not a real live site, I just leave it up and linked for some day in the future when I want to move home and sell real estate.....not sure if I could though you guys have a hard job.

Getyournameoutthere.net…… well it will one day rank #1 for "get your name out there" currently on page two… but it will be a while, since I have many other things to do first that actually make me money.

I have about 30 sites, most are not relevant to this forum topic, so I won’t post links. If you really want to see what I can do, send me a message although I don’t have any interest in soliciting business right now.

About PR. Hey lets admit. A lot of SEO is about links, if you don’t have links you will have a hard time ranking. While at work I use links to their full advantage, at home I tend to be lazy and just do the minimum on pages stuff which is why my pr is so low. I believe that posting links on sites like this is largely a waste of time. It is too easy to get sucked into responses like this! To raise PR, there are plenty of nice places where you can cheaply buy high powered links with no follow tags. That’s what I would do if I was serious about building PR for any of those sites.

Also, no need to apologize for being rude cause you were right, however it would be nice if you had links to your sites we could critique yours as you have mine.






Answer - Not much The whole process took 15-30 minutes. We used "seo friendly" code to drop into the template websites, this is about as effective as trying to optimize a my space page... We had a little creative freedom here, but if we wanted to stay in that 15-30 minute time frame that was tough. After the "SEO" was done in the first 15 minutes, I would move on to the PPC or SEM. I had/have a tool that I developed that would output hundreds of keywords after entering a few cities, or subdivisions.

When someone would call in complaining, I would spend some more time do some Geo-Targeting, Day Parting, etc... for SEO I would submit to a couple free directories.....Like I said..NOT MUCH!

Oh and we charged $350 a month minimum up to $2000 for our super VIP clients.

So you do what people with any SEO knowledge can do themselves for free?

^^ It's the American way! ;-)

Correction, "I DID what people with SOME SEO knowledge could do themselves for free" yes. I had to pay my bills, but I never felt good about it. My new job, I am working for top selling agents who can afford to pay for more of my teams time. My duties are much more complex than my duties were at homes.com.

Last week I had to figure out how to ad alt text to our Realtor website client sites where our logo is on their pages. I had to dig up the html files in our system before they get processed by our .net application and served to clients. Then when adding the alt attributes I had to figure out how to not mess up our internal xml tags in the process. The engineering manager has his own objectives so I am not really allowed to bug his team of engineers for answers so it was tough and allot of reading through internal documentation. Not really much difference in SEO from your scale to mine besides having to know a little about allot just to make sure you don't mess up thousands of websites when performing simple tasks like adding image alt tags.

Unlike many of those who hang out at here - the vast majority of Realtors have zero interest in SEO - or much else to do with the tech part of the web. There is an amazing amount of demand for the type of services offered by Robert.

In the case of customers of template site providers they are also willing to spend an amazing amount of money for what most of us here would consider minimal services. What they save on the website by getting a relatively cheap (or free) site - they end up happily spending on their provider's SEO service often with no results.

Most Realtors are still farther ahead letting someone else take care of the SEO and spending their time with buyers and sellers but they should also make sure that their SEO has a track record of achieving results.

I would like to know if homes.com has individual brokers associated with their feeds and if they bill those brokers for the fees associated with those areas. I always wondered how they got so many feeds without getting that many sites online - or at least on top.

Actually, as I keep reading, I guess I should ask if they even offered the feed integration to their customers who were paying for SEO services. I bet the answer is no isn't it?

So you gave out $350/mo sites to agents that basically had a glorified listing site with a frame gateway, outbound links, and so many internal links that a PR1 was virtually untouchable?

Sound familiar?

Just curious. Not gonna matter either way, I'm taking homes.com and the rest of those high priced nickel and dimers to the cleaners. :)

It’s a database connection with PHP/Java dynamic database driven listings, and all 10,000 or so websites are hosted off the same ip, at least that’s how I remember it when I left. It’s been more than a year since I left now.

I believe they get their listing data via Broker Reciprocity

I am not sure what you mean by feed, if you mean a Really Simple Syndication Feed then yes the answer is no.

The sites we were doing SEO to were not frame sites, they started as sites like this www.ddavehomes.com, and after SEO turned into sites like this www.broomall.com.

Back when the system was built in the early 2000’s it was a good solution, but the size of the company and the sales orientated nature of it, I believe has kept them away from innovation.

Good to hear your business is going well.


I have gotten new business as well lately. I believe the tighter market has forced many realtors to cut out the high paid salespeople/middle man and seek out SEO’s directly. At least that’s how I believe it is here in Southern California.