I am totally in the dark - I have a Point2 Agent site and have worked my way up the page ranks to #4 in Yahoo, #2 on CNN and #1 on MSN. As of about a week ago - I cannot even find my site on Yahoo or CNN - just gone! I would like someone to tell me if its the Point2Agent template thats doing it or my tags?
Please view my source and someone clue me in - it would be much appreciated.

CIndy

How are other Point2 sites faring in this update? I just did a quick unscientific check of a few areas where I seem to remember Point 2 sites had done well previously and I did not notice any in the top 10 so you may not be alone. I doubt that it is your tags unless you have recently made drastic changes.

If it turns out to be a general drop across the board for Point2 sites it would not surprise me as a similar fate has happened to other template site providers in the past. It goes something like this...

The template site provider gets the idea to link their Realtor's sites together to improve search rankings. It works! Their sites move up and in some areas dominate the top results in Yahoo. After a year or so Yahoo notices this - probably from complaints from the public who do not think 8 out of the top 10 results from the same website provider is a good idea(they all look the same to a searcher). Since large template providers have thousands of sites this is a big problem for Yahoo. They take action and the sites no longer rank well.

It has happened to all other template providers that linked their sites together in the past. I am sure Point2 thinks their way of doing it (non reciprocal or 3 way links) escapes detection by spiders but the way the penalty has been applied in the past leads me to believe that the penalty is manually applied. Sometime too much success is a bad thing.

Hi Cindy, I am not real great at checking meta tags etc. But have had experience with Point2Agent. Recently I found my site was totally inoperable. I have no idea how long it had been that way because I have also started a Homes.com site and abandoned the Point2. Maybe there is a problem with their system.When I contacted customer service I got a strange excuse about my domain being expired but all of my domains are still active.

I had a better look at Yahoo's search results this morning and it is not the big purge that I have been expecting. Yahoo does fluctuate their results and I have noticed with some of my own sites that they do drop dramatically with some updates and then reappear with the next update. The best thing is to do nothing for a couple of months until you are absolutely sure the problem is with your site. Making changes now can hurt more than help so you need to be sure that the reason you dropped is permanent before making changes.

Thanks for your help Doug. I have been to the member bulletin board for P2Agent and many folks are suffering. IT is something about the 301 redirects. The search engines are seeing them as duplicate information. So most of the folks that were up at the top - have dropped off. There could be many reasons for this but I hope they get it worked out - I will have to change and forget the template sites - even though it makes things quick and easy. I would rather put up a complete site than be nowhere in the rankings....

Template websites have the benefit of being quick and easy but search engines do punish websites as they are very similar to each other.
RealEstate.NET is in beta testing at the moment, offering FREE websites to agents but once their version 1 kicks in there members system will change besides those that where in the beta testing, so if your interested jump on now rather then waiting.

The biggest issue with template based websites is that they are often to similar to each other, I am a developer working for realestate.net and I think they have the solution within version 1 or 1.01 release.

For an example of how similar websites can be found go to www.copyscape.com and run a search on an agents website, many of those at point2 related to around 10 other pages.
Example: search the following domains within copyscape.com to see pages a search can see as similar:
http://jasonmcgowan1.point2agent.com
http://lindaslocum1.point2agent.com
http://joanarkns.point2homes.biz
etc

Jump onto realestate.net and let me know what you think, the more feedback the better. To setup the website in the beta isn’t fantastic, but version 1 will be the result of many peoples feedback including content packs and more.