Hi Russell,

Earlier in this thread I posted regarding the idea that adding thousands of pages of listings makes for Google love - it is an old idea perpetuated by the developers who offer the service - and it is not true for the most part. As well, keep in mind that Google will only list the IDX info about a particular property once - so just one agent in an area will receive the benefit of having their IDX page returned in a search. The rest will usually be seen as duplicate information and not show in the serps.

So, the first guy who spend $20,000 in an area for a custom IDX may have his pages listed and may get lots of visitors and business but that doesn`t meant that others who follow will enjoy the same success. Although one might get lucky and bump the first guy from time to time...

I understand what you're saying, but I meant this. If you have thousands of pages on your website (or your IDX) and every page has a link back to your home page, that's thousands of links pointing back to your home page, even though they're internal.

I've been following some websites that are doing very well on the Internet and about 90% of their links are all internal links, pointing back to the home page.

For $20K, they better have a really good track record of getting their clients to the top of the search engines. There is no way paying that amount for design and/or database/IDX is worth it.

However, if they have an effective link-building, PR building campaign built in - maybe that's worth it...

Slowly but surely my individual listing pages are starting to show up on the first page of google for the street address search with a number of them in the top 5 positions.

This opens the door to a lot of long tail results.