Real estate website SEO penalized... why?

9 replies
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I created a large real estate website, with IDX integration, which has been up for over a month. It has a fairly popular facebook link. Google ranking is horrible... not even in the first 30 pages. I've used yoast and some audit tools to do some on-page SEO work. Yoast is showing a green light on my two key-phrase optimized pages. There are still recommended tasks and a couple critical errors showing, but I don't see that any of the issues would cause us to rank to badly. I even see non-real estate sites doing better than ours.

Here's our site. I'm hoping for some leads from the community as to what we're doing so wrongly.

Williamsburg VA Real Estate » Williamsburg Dreams

Thanks,
Chris
#estate #penalized #real #seo #website
  • Profile picture of the author DABK
    Your site is not penalized. You have not done enough SEO or enough good SEO.

    What Yoast does its remind you to put the keyword in certain places.

    If you're going for something like Condos for sale in Seattle, you've got several deep-pockets competitors that have massive sites: zillow.com, realtor.com, trulia.com,bbb.com and your local paper and, of course, blockshoper and century21 and....

    They, the first 4, have pages for every keyword you're going to come up with, but they don't specifically go after it... except with onpage. So, you can overtake them without too much effort. But you have to keep it up: every few weeks, you're going to need a few new links.

    Onpage, even assuming you've done it well, is not enough: they've done their onpage quite well.

    You need links, external links. How many? Depends on the quality, but, it's not in the hundreds... unless it's forum posting or articles on ezine... Then, maybe...

    If you have a site on, say, Houses for sale In Seattle, you might want to create a sister site called Condos for sale in Seattle and one called Seattle Townhouses for Sale and one Buying Seattle Homes... and linking them... You might also create sites for Mercer Island Houses for Sale and Bellvue Houses for Sale... and... you get the picture.

    Or, you could go to home inspectors and insurance people and mortgage brokers and convince them to give you a link.

    Originally Posted by greymann View Post

    I created a large real estate website, with IDX integration, which has been up for over a month. It has a fairly popular facebook link. Google ranking is horrible... not even in the first 30 pages. I've used yoast and some audit tools to do some on-page SEO work. Yoast is showing a green light on my two key-phrase optimized pages. There are still recommended tasks and a couple critical errors showing, but I don't see that any of the issues would cause us to rank to badly. I even see non-real estate sites doing better than ours.

    Here's our site. I'm hoping for some leads from the community as to what we're doing so wrongly.

    Williamsburg VA Real Estate » Williamsburg Dreams

    Thanks,
    Chris
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Do you have any reason to say that you're being penalized? That's not the same thing as not ranking high. You say that the site is new, so not ranking is the logical assumption.

    Checked your site with Majestic and there seems to be just 1 backlink. Even if that isn't correct there's your most likely problem.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Like already said, there's no penalty.

    You're up against Zillow & Trulia when ranking home addresses, example, the address below is on your Home page. Doubtful you'll beat that competition. Those are authority sites & you're here asking how to do SEO.


    Keep in mind everyone & their brother has the same real estate listings.
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  • Profile picture of the author bannerwhiz
    How do you mean penalized?
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    • Profile picture of the author greymann
      Thanks for the feedback. This is consistent with advice I'm getting elsewhere. I just want to eliminate possible any on-page issues the SE's might not like. I have a JS error generated from a menu I see in Chrome. It doesn't affect the functionality of the site. Does google penalize for those? I have a couple missing links I need to fix.
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  • This can happen basically because of one simple reason. Maybe, you are getting some links from other websites which have keyword rich anchor text. Remember, Google algorithms are always on roll to penalize those websites who buy links to super-charge their ranking in SERPs..... Or it can be due to over-optimization of your website. But in your case, it's not a penalty.. As you said that your website in just one month old, so Google can put your website up or down in the very starting period of your website. The idea is to get domain authority and earn some link juice by getting high-quality links from relative websites which have ideal anchor text.....
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    • Profile picture of the author greymann
      Thank you. I forgot to mention one baffling problem with a page google refuses to index: Homes for Sale in Williamsburg VA » Neighborhood Guide

      It contains much of our informational content on neighborhoods. I suspect that the wordpress chart plugin that houses that content is somehow making it problematic for indexing... but why google wont' list the page? There is also a google map feed. I will try to find another solution for chart although it requires a lot of reworking, but wondering if anyone knows what's going on. Thanks much.
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