The Realty.bot shuffle: Trulia.com’s response to complaints about nofollow tags on partner-supplied content seems truly atrocious

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Galen Ward’s post on Trulia.com’s policy of adding “nofollow” tags to links back to its own listings partners has elicited quite a bit of controversy.

The original post itself excited a great deal of commentary, and this is explored in encyclopedic detail in a fascinating post by Union Street Media’s Gahlord Dewald.

Trulia.com’s Rudy Bachraty participated for a while in that comment thread, then elected to take the respondent’s side of the debate back to Trulia’s home weblog, where head honcho Pete Flint made an effort to put out the fire. Comments there have been noticeably light, which made me wonder if Trulia has learned ahead of the curve why video commenting is a stoopid idea.

The story was picked up by Inman News today.

I am in the perhaps unique position of being just barely smart enough to explain what’s going on within what might well seem to others to be a blizzard of jargon.

Start here: I observed that Trulia is achieving truly amazing long-tail search results.

Galen pointed out that an ancillary reason for this is that Trulia is not allowing search engines to “follow” its links to its listing partners.

In other words, you — or your broker or your brokerage chain — feed Trulia.com a real estate listing, the primary content it uses to sell advertising. That listing will link back to its source (in hierarchical order: brokerage chain, broker, then lowly you if neither of the others is coming between you and your listing). But that link will include a “nofollow” tag, which means that when search engines see that listing page on Trulia, they will not queue your own page for spidering, nor will they in any other way regard that link as lending any strength to your page.

In still other words, Trulia is happy to feast on your crackers, but it’s not about to share any of its Google juice with you.

Trulia’s claims about why it is not doing this are specious and bogus, in my opinion, but you can read their side of the story at their weblog.

Does this actually matter? I think so, for two reasons. First, the link back from Trulia.com to your web site will be a very high-authority link, very good for your own SEO. Second, if someone is entering a long-tail search term for your listing — for example, the exact street address — Trulia.com is doing everything it can to elbow you out of the way on search traffic for your own listings.

By contrast, Zillow.com does not add nofollow tags to links back to agent- or broker-supplied listings.

By contrasting contrast, for now Zillow is adding nofollow tags to the effectively unlimited links in the “About Me” section of user-supplied profiles (but not in the “Contact Information” section). In contrast to that, Trulia.com is not adding nofollow tags to profile links — except that profile links are hugely restricted on Trulia.com.

Is that much as clear as mud?

Let’s start here: This is a link to my profile as I wish it were appearing on Realty.bot sites.

This is that same profile on Zillow.com. They won’t let me put my pictures exactly where I want them, but mostly they’re staying out of my hair. For now, Zillow.com is adding nofollow tags to the profile links, but Zillow has said this is an error that they are in the process of correcting.

This is that same profile on Trulia.com. No photos, no links, no personality. The regimented links up at the top don’t have the nofollow tag, but all of my other links have been stripped out of the HTML.

My take on all of this, from the point of view of an SEO layman: Trulia.com is not being an honest broker about this. The clear intent of putting nofollow tags on listings supplied by agents, brokers and brokerage chains is to compete with or eclipse those suppliers on the long-tail search terms that should be coming directly to those suppliers.

If Trulia can grab the click first, it gets the ad revenue, and, possibly, also the added “featured listing” type of revenue. This is not nearly as odious a Chokepoint Charlie type of strategy as those deployed by lead vendors or Realtor.com, but it is of a piece with the same kind of thinking: Trulia.com wants to interpose itself between consumers of real estate services — buyers and sellers — and vendors of real estate services — agents, brokers and brokerages.

That by itself is not outrageous, but deliberately crippling the SEO results of its listing partners, in order to outpace them in search results, definitely is.

Zillow’s way of handling links back to listings is better — including its inversion of Trulia’s top-down hierarchy. Everyone supplying listings to Trulia.com should make their dissatisfaction with its practices known.

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology