Beta Testers Wanted

[HHI Golf Guy]

I'm thinking of trying another experiment on one of my new sites, and would like to know if anyone would be interested in participating.

What I am trying to accomplish is to find a way to strengthen the backlinks to my web site(s), as well as the outbound links from my sites(s). Hopefully, these tactics will help boost SERP's in any backling portions of SE algos.

First, take a look at this link directory (http://www.hiltonheadfsbo.net/florida-real-estate.htm) page that we developed. Instead of a traditional Florida real estate link exchange page, you will notice that the top of the page contains "fun facts" about Florida. Also, notice that Google is serving up ads from advertisers targeting Florida, and not our Hilton Head (SC) market.

From a Google standpoint, any Florida RE agent receiving a link exchange from this page should receive a link popularity boost over a traditional link exchange.

The next idea that I am thinking of implementing is requiring anyone that wishes to exchange links with this site provide me a 2-3 paragraph story about the town(s) that they service. At some point in the story the would provide the proper anchor text and link to their site. In theory, this will boost the authority factor of the link, as well as the authority factor of the inbound and outbound sites.

I would allow 2-3 link partners on each page. Over time, each state could accumulate multiple pages. Each "story" would have an <h2> heading summary.

In return, link partners would create similar pages on their own site. Copying my "fun facts" section would be OK. The site would also need to run Adsense on the page - it's a great tool to see if G classifies the page correctly. The page must be crawlable and indexed by G, Y!, and MSN.

Traditional reciprocal links will not be allowed on these pages - only links within narratives!

You would use your own title tags, meta tags, and HTML layout.. This is important - we do not want any SE to tag the pages as duplicate content! Having the same narratives an multiple web sites will not trigger any duplicate content penalties unless the HTML layout of the sites is very, very, similar.

To be on the safe side, you can have multiple versions of your narrative for distribution.

Let me know if you're interested. I'm in the middle of a big project right now, but I should be ready to run with this in the next few weeks. I will probably set up a special login page and database on my business web site.

If this works correctly, we will spin this off into a pay service. Beta testers will have a free lifetime membership. All work materials and in-process work materials have already been copyrighted and notarized.

[Las Vegas Homes]

Very nice post HHI Golf Guy, please give me a little time to digest this and I will get back to you. What you purpose sounds something like what my partner and I have discussed in relation to the surrounding text around the anchor. I believe you may be right on the money with this and we may be willing to participate in this with you as we have several real estate sites around the country.

I hope you do continue to posting on the forums, I have seen your post on other forums and you seem to be a very knowledgable Realtor. There are not to many Realtors that work the internet and not only have a insight into the real estate business but also know how to use that in their activities on the internet to increase the productivity of their websites.

[HHI Golf Guy]

Thanks - but I'm not a Realtor. Not yet, anyway.

Here's the scoop:

I spent 18 years as a General Manager with Marriott. Got married just over 2 years ago and had to decide whether I still wanted to work 60-70 hours a week at the hotel or stay married. I chose to stay married.

Started a hotel consulting business, picked up a small hotel portfolio, then marketed my business through the WWW. Studied this thing called SEO and found it fascinating.

SEO'd my site and a few others. Received local inquiries on designing web sites, web marketing, and SEO. Expanded my business to include design & SEO. Eliminated all but one hotel portfolio.

I saw all of the leads some of my clients were receiving from their web sites and the wheels started turning in my head. I saw a lot of FSBO advertising in the local market, but no way for these people to target Hilton Head buyers (as opposed to FSBO buyers) on the internet. Spent months working on a business model for a comprehensive, local FSBO marketing service. Designed the site, and opened the site to SE's the other week. I will finish up the members section this week, then start marketing to the FSBO sellers here in 2 weeks.

During this process I piqued the interest of my father, and encouraged him to re-new his broker's license and be my partner in a new real estate firm. We're in the legal stages of setting up the corporation now. I will be going for my license in March.

The [b]average[b] price of a home in this area is at $550k -only because a few "affordable" $130k-$200k range communities sprung up. The majority of the homes in this area are at $750k - $10,000,000. With the amount of search engine leads that we can develop it's a no brainer to jump into this business. We don't have to worry about splitting commissions with the corporate entity - we are the corporate entity! Heck, we already have 3 people that want to list with us this summer.

I have a few really neat tools that will be on our web site(s) later this year that are designed to take advantage of the real estate web surfer mentality as well as capitalize on the fact that 70+% of homebuyers in this market are from out of state or international. I have never seen these tools on another real estate web site. I'll keep you posted as they develop.

Of course, there's a lot more to real estate than developing leads - you need to close the deal! But as a hotel GM, sales, marketing, and sales calls were part of my every day routine.

As far as the narratives go as described earlier, this will work. By focusing on the State and locality in the narrative, the receiving realtor site will receive "authority value" on their region.

Once I'm ready to go with it I will set up a PW protected part of my site to act as a clearing house or database hub for anyone that is interested.

[frobn]

Traditional reciprocal links will not be allowed on these pages - only links within narratives!

You have done your research. I am working on a similar tactic with some folks at open-realty.org. I am tying up a few loose ends before making it public.

BTW, your site is excellent. Both your design and content are well thought out. Its good to see css/xhtml done correctly.

Regards,
Frank

[HHI Golf Guy]

BTW, your site is excellent. Both your design and content are well thought out. Its good to see css/xhtml done correctly.

Thanks! Wanna buy something :D

[frobn]

I have a question. Are you proposing that all links will be shared by all link partners or each that each partner develop their own link partners?

BTW I may might just have some things that I want to buy.

Regards,
Frank

[HHI Golf Guy]

My idea is that I would set up a site for people to submit their narratives. Each month, updated content would be available to the members via email or download.

The content would consist of the HTML code of the narrative and the link text within the narrative. It would probably be limited to two links per narrative.

Each member will then copy and paste the narratives within their own web pages.

Right now I'm leaning towards this once-a-month static delivery system. While it may be more cumbersome, my thinking is that it will not raise many red flags with SE's (i.e. artificial link building programs, gaining too many links too fast, etc.).

Frankly, this idea is in the beginning stages and I have alot to work out with this idea. I would appreciate it greatly if anyone wants to share ideas.

[frobn]

Thank you for the explanation.

I was working on a similar idea but after more research I see problems with my idea. My thought was to create a database with an admin area where link partners could enter a descriptive information, email, location and url that would would then be written to an html file, converted to javascript so that link partners would receive the updates at their website on a regular basis. This was before I realized that it would trigger duplicate content. While creating the file manually as you propose would be better I still see as creating a potential duplicate content problem. How about a script that randomly picks x number of links and creates several different files with random links? The links would be sorted by location. Randomizing the links over several files may even be a plus, each time a file is generated it would be new content for the search engine to index.

[HHI Golf Guy]

While I think that duplicate content can be a potential hot button, it is my belief that it is an overly sensitive topic. For example, CNN, Fox News, ESPN, and just about every online newspaper use the same AP (or ither) syndicated news feeds and content.

I believe (but have no concrete proof) that duplicate content penalties will kick in when:

1. Two or more domains contain the exact same content.
2. To or more domains contain a high percentage of duplicate content and structure (HTML and/or navigation).

If you have a real estate site with 6 or 7 pages of content and then duplicate a bunch of links pages you may have a problem. Then again, if all you have is 6 or 7 pages of content you shouldn't expect to rank high in any major search engine.

My original thought was that if this network had a lot of users, each user would be given one page of 30-50 links each month to upload to their site. The links on these pages would be randomly generated from the DB each month so that the chances were slim that any two members would have the same set of links.

However, my focus has shifted from a simple link exchange to the 2-3 page narrative with links so that the surrounding content solidifies the value of the link. In theory, if there were enough members then the random generator might work.

But if everyone uses their own HTML code to design their page and comes up with their own opening paragraph (or interesting information table) then there should be no problems with any potential duplicate content filters.

Also, if we have enough members from each state, each webmaster/SEO could mix and match the narratives on each page (assuming only 2-3 narratives per page).

Using automation for distribution is fine, but I would want to stay away with automatically generated pages or pages created dynamically when accessed by a web surfer. I don't want any "footprints" to trace the links just in case one of the SE's decides to classify it as a link building "scheme" rather than a legitimate link partnership.

I was planning to start on this project within the next week, but now I have to convert one of my ASP / MS Access sites to a PHP / MySQL system in order to move to a new web host. My grasp of MySQL and PHP is fair at best, and converting a large members section will take me a few weeks.

In the meantime, I like your ideas. Let's keep this idea alive.

[frobn]

Thank you for elaborating on duplicate content. I still think it is a concern but not as much as before.

Have you given any thought to automating the process?

[frobn]

I am a little surprised that there has not been more interest. I believe the ideas here can improve SEO. For myself, I would like to be part of the experiment. I also think that there needs to be some way to automate the process so that ordinary site owners can participate. I plan to gather some data and develop and work on an automation process that will not trigger duplicate content.

[HHI Golf Guy]

Before automating the system, I believe that it should be a manually operated test with a select group of partners. I would not want to open this up for general use until all the bugs have worked out and we can verify that it actually offers value to the users.

Besides - I have to upgrade my PHP/MySQL skills. I'm struggling big time with a program that I am trying to write. I'm still stuck in MS Access/ASP mode :(

[frobn]

Before automating the system, I believe that it should be a manually operated test with a select group of partners. I would not want to open this up for general use until all the bugs have worked out and we can verify that it actually offers value to the users.

Besides - I have to upgrade my PHP/MySQL skills. I'm struggling big time with a program that I am trying to write. I'm still stuck in MS Access/ASP mode :(

You are correct about manual testing first that is why I want to gather some data to play with and test out. I admire your logic and I give you a lot of credit for your ability to learn and execute php/mysql. My ability is in my capacity to find relationships between seemingly unrelated data. Once I ferret out the relationships it's easy for me to write pseudo code for the programmer who will write the program.

[HHI Golf Guy]

I admire your logic and I give you a lot of credit for your ability to learn and execute php/mysql.

There's nothing to admire yet - I have only half of my program working. :D


My ability is in my capacity to find relationships between seemingly unrelated data.

I spent 18+ years running hotels for Marriott, and one of the areas that I enjoyed most was Revenue Management Analysis. In fact, I still consult for a portfolio of hotels for some extra $$$. I wrote a whole package of software to analyze bookings, lead times, rates, sell strategies, restrictions, etc. Call me crazy, but I LIKE math!

[frobn]

I have been experimenting with part of your fun facts idea and I want to give something back in return. I don't anticipate using it as a multiple links swap which is your experiment.

There are always multiple ways to code and you may already have a way to it. If you do not here is one way to consider to automate the process. Create two related tables, one for the fun facts which would have two fields -- state_code and fun_facts. The second table would have fields for the state_code and the descriptions. When a call is made for a state the script will select the state fun facts, write it to a file then select the descriptions for that state and write up 3 descriptions per page. It is not a difficult task. A more difficult task will be to write a script for an admin section. I may be able to modify something from open-realty but I haven't given it much thought at this point. I have the pages loading dynamically from files and will put them in a database once I commit to a format.

Regards,
Frank

[HHI Golf Guy]

More than likely, any automation will have to be written with MySQL/PHp since its more versatile across server platforms than ASP/MS Access.

I appreciate your insight - I haven't given any thought to the nuts and bolts yet. I'm about 75% done with the second part of my database system. The next part is going to be the difficult one. Tons of tables, relationships, and a fairly large algo to determine the results. My head is already spinning :eek:

[judyo]

I would love to be a beta tester but I'm not really sure what would be expected from me. I'd have to be walked through it. Also, I'd have to do this with my other site that I'm still working on that isn't live yet.

[happy home]

Nice work

good luck

[DomainDrivers]

Golf Guy...

What I am trying to accomplish is to find a way to strengthen the backlinks to my web site(s), as well as the outbound links from my sites(s). Hopefully, these tactics will help boost SERP's in any backling portions of SE algos.

Did you ever persue this idea? I spoke with someone in Charleston who has a similar idea.

[HHI Golf Guy]

Golf Guy...
Did you ever persue this idea? I spoke with someone in Charleston who has a similar idea.

Our link strategies are working great, although they have evolved a bit since my original post. We have moved our link pages to sub domains and created real estate information portals that include links, articles, rss news feeds, and agent rss feeds. YOu can read more about it at our real estate link, article, and rss exchange (http://www.realestatelinkhq.com) web site.

[Bill]

HHI Golf Guy,

I would be intersted in taking part in your test.

Please contact me.

Bill@makenawailea.com

[Cedar City Utah Realtor]

HHI Golf Guy. I am very interested in joining your RSS feed program. Obviously I will need to speak with my people to make sure its ok but that sounds like a great way to gain some easy content and links. Is it ok if I put my those links of a subdomain though? That way I dont risk trashing my main page if this plan goes sour?

[HHI Golf Guy]

HHI Golf Guy,

I would be intersted in taking part in your test.

Please contact me.

Bill@makenawailea.com

Thanks, but testing is over. If you are interested in swapping links, articles, of RSS feeds please visit http://www.realestatelinkhq.com

[HHI Golf Guy]

HHI Golf Guy. I am very interested in joining your RSS feed program. Obviously I will need to speak with my people to make sure its ok but that sounds like a great way to gain some easy content and links. Is it ok if I put my those links of a subdomain though? That way I dont risk trashing my main page if this plan goes sour?

That's no problem. We have ALL of our feeds, link exchanges, and article exchanges on sub domains.