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Here is how the first post began:
Greg Swann at Bloodhound blog on June 21, 2007 launched the new blog Real Estate Weblogging 101.
What Greg didn’t realize was he also set in motion an experiment I have been wanting to run here in the lab.
Here is the basis for the experiment:
- Setup a new domain name.
- Use WordPress as the basis
- Instead of Post use Pages
- See how the search engines respond
When I say search engines, I’m referring to Google primarily.
Since we recently had a PR update from Supreme Ruler I couldn’t resist going back to the site and seeing how the experiment is proceeding.
Quite well is the short answer. I should say amazing considering this is a blog that is barely 4 months.
In our second post on the site it was just over 2 months old and had nothing in supplemental results that shouldn’t be there. Time has passed and the issue of supplemental results is history. I miss them in a way, but not really.
What I found this week.
- The home page has a PR4
- Almost every page of the site had a PR3.
- There are a handful of PR2 pages.
- There appear to be 4 or 5 posts, Two of those have PR3 The others aren’t showing as indexed.
The internal linking of pages is established by a “Table of Contents” on every page which means every page is linked to every other page is significant. The same effect is now being done on sites that are publishing their archives in the sidebar navigation.
I don’t know about you but I would love to have a site that is less than 4 months old with about 40 pages not only indexed but with a PR3 and a PR4 home page with a smattering of PR2′s for good measure.
If I were ever going to build a static site with only pages and additional content to be added from time to time. This is how I would do it with a focus on pages not posts.
If I were thinking of changing locations to another part of the country and wanted to establish a presence there I would take my best blog posts, edit them to fit the location. Put them on a new site. Publish the entire site in a single step. I’d do this about 4 months before I was actually making the move and I would watch this little seedling grow to an oak.
Thanks again Greg for this great site. It is filled with valuable content and is being justly rewarded for it.
PS. Greg, please forgive the corny prose in the Supreme Ruler post the other day. : )
If you want to read the first two posts they are Real Estate Weblogging 101 and Real Estate Weblogging 101 2 month old Plus
Bless you, sir. Thank you.
Here is what I think is cool about that site. It’s been that way almost from the beginning.
Greg,
Great results, choosing a word like weblogging I’m sure helps. Which goes to show chose keywords wisely and it will end in good results.
Thanks for providing such a valuable resource and a great experiment for the lab.
Do you think that link exchange helps or hurts my rankings?
Paul,
If you mean a straight link exchange (not a blogroll) it depends on the number of links exchanged as the number per page.
It won’t really help you, but it could really hurt you.
From a brief look at your site, you don’t have many links going out so not a big concern for hurting you, but there isn’t any real help there that I can see.
Thank you for taking the time to check out the site. I really appreciate it.
Hi Dave,
I just thought I would check in and see what you have been writing about. Interesting that I came by today. Seems lots of people have independently concluded that it would be possible to take an WP blog and turn it into a rockstar website. While I am certainly no coder, I was able to take a blog that I use, but, have never built any real links to and recently turned it into a full on website. I’t not yet as pretty as it will be, but, it is my test. I set the blog up about 7 months ago and it popped up at the top of page 2 for city real estate and I thought…hmmm, Maybe I could make something of this and that’s when I started. I will need to wait for the next PR update as now it’s sort of game on to see how it will perform. It was working perfectly until Wolfnet changed the width of my framedd IDX, but, I can certainly attest to this being an excellent and inexpensive way to get a website up with a blog on it as well. Have a look and don’t be too harsh:
alpharetta-real-estate-blog.com
Congratulations Ryan
First off, Kudos to Greg and Dave for a) putting it up and b) sharing the results. Nice job.
@Paul–If you are talking about a bunch of “you link to me” and “I’ll link to you”..the answer is that the risks far outweigh any benefit IMO. (Spot on Dave…) Reciprocal links do occur NATURALLY though (such as the result of someone citing each others’ posts and commenting on them. By focusing on actually building relationships with folks around the RE.net world, you will naturally gain authority. Worry less about “techniques” and more about having something to say–trust me here…it works.
The reason that Greg’s bloodhound blog has the following it does (and the authority from Google) is because of the QUALITY of the writing and focus on having something to say–errr…howl about (grin). Search Engine Friendly + Writing Talent + Effort = Results
@Ryan-I would agree TOTALLY with that WP is structured well, especially with some of the available plugins to work as either a site OR a blog and be search engine friendly.
Great job again Greg….my compliments to the chef.
The table of contents idea is one I like. Everyone seems to have a site map, but I like your term better.
Dave-
A bit off topic to this post, but I wanted to chat a bit with you about the results I’m having with my new blog over the last 3 months, along with what I’ve learned about the domain name change I’ve gone through this week. I’d post about it on my blog, but it would really make more sense to post about it here. I’ll send you an email with more details about what I’m talking about.
Ok Dave, I looked high and low for an email address for you, but you’ve done well keeping that a secret. Think you could shoot me an email at steve at teambelt dot com?
Eric,
I don’t think that I explained what I meant well enough. I didn’t mean you link me I’ll link you. Through blogging and forums we started seeing great results. Are SE rank was increasing, building relationships, and most importantly getting great information to help with our success. What I mean by link exchange is that we tried a new system that I never heard of and it was suppose to help. Since we have seen a decrease in SE ranking. So I was wondering if anyone had heard of this sort of SEO and had an experience with this. Please don’t think that I blog for links alone. I enjoy blogging and have found people that are willing to offer advice.
Paul –
Can you describe the “new system” you guys tried out? Are any of your competitors running significant SEO pushes?
Great minds think alike, Mr. Red Shirt. I’ve been slowly populating a primarily static WordPress site. Mostly pages, a handful of posts (once I add them.)
Too many neighborhoods to do it quickly but it will get there over time.
Hey Jonathan,
Hows the grass coming? I’ve been pretty busy but I try and drop by from time to time, but don’t remember seeing an update on the yard for winter. Did I miss it?
Eric,
I’ll try to explain this as best as I can. We get put on a list with hundreds of other website owners. Then they link to you and we link to them. It is like a circle where everyone in that circle gets and gives links. Let me know what you think.
Paul;
This is the “other” Eric again…building systems to artificially increase link popularity will not work long term. Search engines are in the business of finding those and penalizing them…just my opinion, but using those types of systems is short term gain, longer term pain. It shortens the life of your asset. Better to build more slowly and defensibly IMO. There’s no need to use those systems when doing it the right way works.
Thank you for your thoughts. I appreciate it. I found it to be a bad idea when we take his code off the website we increase our SERP we put it back on they decrease. So the consensus is that link exchange does not work?
Paul –
Excessive reciprocal linking is downright dangerous…many can personally attest to that. Earlier this year, Google decided to make an example of many webmasters with their “shot across the bow.” Check this out…
Paul –
They’re downright dangerous…Google fired a “shot across the bow” that effectively ended reciprocal link campaigns among knowledgeable SEO’s a little earlier this year.
Thank you for everything. We have since taken it down. I appreciate all the help. Especially the seomoz link
Eric gave you sound advice. I just transferred my site to CMS based site (Drupal) with static pages and an integrated blog. I’m hoping for the same effect. Its been live since Saturday, and the first few pages of a site search are the new pages. It will be interesting to see how it does in the next couple of months.
All I can say is wow, this is a good one to follow the example of.
WordPress sure seems like the way to go. Has anyone had any really good experiences with hosting companies? If so, any suggestions on specific companies would be appreciated.
Barry –
I’ve always had good luck w/ godaddy. For $4/month you get a ton of space, transfer, & 10 mysql databases.
I use virtual private servers (multiple) with both godaddy and 1and1.com and I like them both. 1and1′s customer service team seems far more friendly to me…pricing is eerily similar.
Awesome. Thanks Eric and Eric. I’ll check them out. Hey Bramlett, I saw you on Bloodhound. Congrats.
Barry,
They are both on the bloodhound, so it is getting harder to keep our Eric B’s apart.
Yeah…but if I had to share it with someone…glad its someone like Bramlett (grin). He’s pretty fun.
Although we’ve never been senn in the same place at the same time…
hmmmm….(grin)
Eric B(lackwell)
I took a generic WP blog, spiced it up, blogged my fanny off, and went from PRO to PR5. I then plunked down some cash, bought a shiny new site with a custom IDX, moved my blog to a subdomain, and dropped to a PR2.
Shows how much I know.
Lydia,
You have no idea how much you have influenced this site and all the other blogs I author.
You chose wisely grasshopper when you chose your generic WP blog theme. It was Misty Look and that theme’s author knows how to design themes for SEO.
I found your blog with the PR5 on EVERY PAGE and was amazed. I checked out that theme, found another by the author and tweaked that theme for weeks.
The next time I came back to your site I couldn’t believe my eyes. The theme was gone. I’m not kidding I almost cried because I knew what was going to happen. And you just described it.
It wasn’t broken, but you fixed it. I hope someday you will be back to a PR5.
You truly inspired me and I have created all of our single property sites since from that same modified theme.
I owe it all to you. Thank You.
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but seeing what happened to your site is one of the reasons I added a new blog and kept the old one instead of migrating everything to a new site and getting rid of the old one. It is more to maintain, but I know I have a great backup. Both sites continue to bring in lots of traffic and readers.
Lydia, thanks for stopping by. I mean it when I say I owe you a lot. : )
once I have time I am going to try to do this with one of my wordpress blogs as well. Not sure I have the technical ability though.
Dave, thank you for that amazing comment. It brought a tear to my eye (sniff).
I moved the blog to a subdomain to make way for my REW site, which I think was a move forward, but yes, it killed my PR for the blog.
REW did the second theme for the blog. I won’t lie- I thought it was really ugly and I hated it. So now I’m on my third theme, which is by the same designer of MistyLook. Hopefully I can rebuild.
Sadly, I’ve been kind of burned out on blogging lately. Plus I’ve been SO busy lately. I’m sure I’ll catch my muse and get back to it.
Thanks for the pick-me-up Dave, that was a really thoughtful gesture!!!
Lydia,
You are so very welcome. Again I’m glad you found the lab.
Burn out is really easy to achieve especially when you are very busy. I’m glad to hear you are busy : )
Keeping 4 blogs going has brought me to the brink of burn out myself. My baby blog was born on July 15 and I managed a post everyday for over the first 100 days, but then busy hit and . . . you know the story.
BTW I added your blog to the baby blogs blogroll. I like the theme and your content.
Lydia –
Is this part of the shift we’ve been discussing @ REW?
Unless you preserve the identical structure of the old blog (i.e. change the index page, but keep all your old pages up) you’re going to see a drop in SERPs & PR. You should see a bounce back very soon.
Eric,
I don’t think there will be a bounce back for Lydia. I say that because the change was made over 6 months ago. It was more than just content it was structure.
And the loss of all incoming links. Honestly, I doubt she will ever be back to a PR5 on almost every page as she was before. But I hope I am wrong.
Lydia had a perfect balance of pages and posts in the root directory and had good internal linking as well as external.
This is one case where something that wasn’t broken was fixed.
Six months is plenty of time to bounce back. If the links were lost then there will be no bounce-back. Why were the IBLs lost?
When I went to the REW site, they killed my old MistyLook theme and moved the blog to a subdomain.
The blog used to be at northofthesavannah.com and now it is hosted at northofthesavannah.com/posts/
I should have been on top of it more, but frankly I wanted that custom IDX and was focused more on that than the potential SEO side-effects of moving the blog content down.
The IBL’s to the main domain should be fine, but any deep links to the original articles are probably 404.
Lydia –
It would be extremely tedious, but you could go back & 301 all of the old URL’s. If you go to your webmaster tools, you should be able to see which pages have links, and which are “not found.” If you check, and you have a ton of links going to internal pages, then it would be worth it to 301 redirect them all.
I know Thanksgiving is tomorrow, but I was wondering when I can expect a new post. I think I am going through withdrawals
Happy Thanksgiving all
Paul,
I am too. It has been an amazing month so far. Meaning, I’m so busy helping with the real estate side of our business all the blogs have taken a back seat to the actual practice of real estate.
I do have a couple of things on the burner and hope to get to them today or tomorrow. I’m not a holiday kind of guy. I use them to get caught up on work.
I’ve been using a gallery plugin recently. That will be coming up very soon.
Like taxes Dave,
That is a nice problem to have…here’s wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving, however you celebrate it…I am a lay low and catch up sort of guy as well.
Best to you and yours.
Eric
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Here’s to undoing the belt buckle on the couch!
Dave,
Which gallery plugin are you playing with? I’ve been using Popup Image Gallery by Andy Staines to feature listings with. It works pretty well, once I got it set up the way I wanted it. Here is what mine looks like: Gallery Example
I hope that’s not a live link…
Ryan,
It wasn’t live, but I made it live. I like live links. Never fear to use them here in the lab.
I know some (REW for one) don’t like live links, but I do. I hate having to retype URL’s and put in the dot or anything else. I want it to work when I click on it.
I’m using the Next Gen gallery which works in conjunction with lightbox. You don’t have to use light box there are several options for display including slide show.
I’ll be doing a write up on it soon. I’ll take a look at the Popup Image Gallery you mentioned as well.
O.K. I like that. the only thing is it sort of loads the photos slowly. I’m going to give it a shot on my test blog and see if it will work for me better than what I am using right now…
Ryan,
I resize the images to no taller than 500px, but more important I set them to 72 dpi for display in the net. This alone will make your images much quicker to load no matter the dimension.
If you keep them small like 400 X 300 they should load very fast.
I just downloaded and activated the two needed plugins and I see it in the visual editor. I\’m going to have to put it down for the night and get back to it on Monday. By the way, your blog (this one) was the the inspiration for my test blog, http://www.realestatetestblog.com. I can do things to it I wouldn\’t dream of on my regular blogs.
Have you had a chance to see if a gallery will work in a post or does it need to be a page?
Dave, Once again this seems to be a really great idea. I am wondering what you think is the best way to easily implement internal linking of pages “Table of Contents†on every page in a wordpress blog??
I would very much welcome your advice.
Jim
James,
The best internal linking involves Related Posts from the Past called the Contextual Related Posts Plugin
And putting your archives in the sidebar creating internal links on every post to every post. You can read about it here: Tag Team Archives