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.

I would gladly pay anywhere from $0 to $100,000.00 for a real estate site that would deliver a ROI in some acceptable amount of time. Back when I used to market RE sites (to be clear, I'm not commenting to solicit customers - I'm not in that business anymore) I would *guarantee* search results on the first page of Google based on the customer's keyword pick, or they would get that site for free. This pick was usually "<city> <state> real estate".

Of course I couldn't do it for everyone in a given town because space on the first page of Google search results is limited. But not everyone could afford it so it worked out well for me and the very few who would pay the money to be where I promised to put them.

There are two groups of web site consultants - those who build, and those who market. Typically, they don't have the combined skills to do both well. Most companies will boast of their marketing ability, but they are only as good as their guarantee.

Good point, Russell, concerning the maintenance. Maintenance can be very expensive, depending on the complexity of the site. On the larger sites, maintenance can easily run upwards of $50K per year. Some brokerages will opt to have their own IT staff so long as it makes economical sense.

There is a little bit of misinformation in this thread concerning the IDX multiple URL issue. Google can and does list a property address multiple times for a listing that is IDX'd on multiple agent/broker sites in a given town. That same property result can be on the first page of results with the multiple brokerages listed (those details depend upon multivariate statistics as they apply to Google's algorithms, but there is no hard stop rule against a unique IDX URL appearing on multiple domains in the search results.) This can be proven by a simple search.

Thank God my career as IT consultant has gone real estate broker and now I don't have to pitch myself of what can and should be done. I'm happy to share that information here though.

Cheers.

I have 5 sites and the total cost for all of these is less than $10,000 including SEO, backlinking, and all construction costs. (The original site was a custom build and the have the same architecture)

I would go beyond saying sites are like a car, they are like a plant.

You have to plant (build) them correctly and then once they're built they need to get sufficient water (back-links), sunshine (traffic from other sites), and nutrients (content).

You don't need to pay big money to do this. You learn how to do it yourself and you do it consistently.

My sites are a passive yet steady lead generator.

I have 4 sites that are focused on Downtown Vancouver Condos and I get buyers who want to know more about the specific building a and I get sellers who want to work with the building expert (The sites make me that).

Check them out, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.freesiavancouver.com
http://www.1033marinaside.ca
http://www.1067marinaside.ca
http://www.rafflesonrobson.ca

My last site is my personal site which is a vanity site. This site has the highest page rank and shows up for most of the keywords I am after.

http://www.mikestewart.ca/

Going forward I would focus more on conceptual URLS associated with the keywords I want to target.

Thoughts?

Mike: Awesome job on freesiavancouver.com. You are doing exactly what I'm doing with listings (youtube walk-thru and photos as well). That youtube greeting on the front - NICE. Very personal.

How are your youtube stats looking? People are watching them like crazy I bet. I started this "neighborhood drive thru" so that buyers can have an idea of what the neighborhood is like instead of *just* the house...it's no frills...just me in my car with the radio on driving thru the neighborhood (then reuse it for all listings in that neighborhood). People watch that stuff like it's the Superbowl or something. :-)

P.S. You're lucky you have a nice "radio voice". Just right. Great job.

Just an update on some of the things talked about in this thread...

It appears that O.C. Real Estate's expensive custon IDX on her $20,000 website (which she also talks about in another thread in our Webmaster's Forum) is no longer working. Speculation is that the returns did not justify the cost. Perhaps she would care to update us on this.

Also, earlier in the post there was talk about the reason for having a search engine friendly IDX was basically for having all of the links pointing back at the site's main entry page. If you are considering this you may want to check out Webmaster Worlds Google forum FAQ - in particular the discussions about the -950 Penalty. In the several hundred pages of discussion about this penalty one of the problems identified was the repeated occurrence of keywords in anchor text. In those threads people have basically tried a similar strategy with not the results they hoped for.

Also discussed earlier in the thread was the issue about whether a custom IDX is really "unique" content or if it would be considered "duplicate content" in Google's eyes - and be ignored by the search engines. It seems that Google may be indeed looking at IDX listings as duplicate content in spite of each site having different titles, tags, styles etc. - as per this discussion in the forum of a company that provides these custom IDX Systems. Members there are reporting seeing their IDX pages and the pages of other custom IDXers being dropped from Google.

All in all - more to consider before taking the plunge.