IBS Team Blog

There's been a pretty noticeable shake in the blogs, forums and social networks related to real estate industry where well known online marketing providers having troubles with their web sites staying with their "heads above the water". Yes, I'm talking about those penalties in Yahoo and recently in Google triggered by excessive reciprocal linking. In many forums agents announcing their links to be removed and many marketing companies removing (or suggesting to remove) them for their clients.

Note to myself - "Max, read this!".. oh maaan.. more reading, where will I get the time for it...

• Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis

Danny Sullivan (at SearchEngineLand) wrote a very long articles on Google PageRank yesterday.. it already has over 500 diggs in one day. I haven't read it yet, everyone says its a must read :)

Here are the main topics Danny covers:

• Google's Definition: PageRank As Votes

Pretty good news from Google today - they have added "URL Removals" options to their Webmaster Central tools. This tools allows to remove not only URLs, images or files from Google's index, but also whole directories, sub folders, a whole site if you wish and even cached pages in the results. I noticed that many agents lately fighting duplicate content issues, wrong cache in the results, supplemental results etc. Well, I think this is a great tool to play with.

There is an interesting post at SEOmoz.org called How Reliable is Google Analytics? by Michael Martinez. Michael makes a very strong point that Google Analytics may not be as reliable as we think it is. He compares some numbers between Google Analytics and his own web log data for one of his web sites (Xenite.Org):

New great tool from Google Labs was mentioned yesterday in Google's Official Blog - Google Trends. Google Trends is a Search Volume Comparison Tool that allows to retrieve "some" historical search data and compare the search volumes between each other and corresponding news volume for the same queries. The comparison is made visually in form of graphs - no numbers provided. You can compare up to 5 keywords/phrases and dig into them by year/month and country.

At the end of February I wrote a post on Google Page Creator - just when Google released it. Well, 2 months later and a bit (today) I searched for my full name [Max Chirkov], just out of curiosity, and was very surprised to see my Google page ranking #2 just right below this site. Even more surprising is Google PageRank 4 for that page even though Google doesn't show any links pointing to it.

I just submitted two listings to Yahoo! Local - one Featured and one Enhanced, so now when I have some experience doing that I can clarify on the costs, which might be not even close to $25 a month. I think Yahoo!

The first time I saw Point2Homes implemented agents listings as RSS feeds binded together with Google Maps and Google Earth I was really impressed. What a great tool for real estate web sites!

Google Page Creator - very nice addition to all the free service and software Google already provides. Very simple to use and I find it much easier than some of the template web sites with back-ends I ever worked on.