Thread: Beta Testers Wanted

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 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.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

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

Originally Posted by frobn

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?