How much do Search Engines remember old keywords and links?

This article isn't about Real Estate necessarily, as the ideas discussed can really apply to any web page, and optimizing it for search engines, but I'll use examples and lessons that I've learned from working on my folks Real Estate website to illustrate my theory.

When reading about Search Engine Optimization - methods for making web pages do better in search results - I've come across alot of comments that indicate that you should refresh, and otherwise update your content frequently. In response to this, I began to update the page titles for my folks listings on a regular basis, changing the keyword "house" to "home", "acres" to "acreage", and "lake front" to "water front" for example. Now I figured also that, since the search engines don't crawl and process at exactly the same time, that it might increase the odds of coming up in results for a wider variety of keywords. For example, if Yahoo crawls a listing when it says "Lakefront Home 30 Minutes South Of Jackson, MI", and then I change the title to "Water Front Property 60 Minutes West of Ann Arbor Michigan", and Google crawls the page, then between two search engines I've just associated the page for that listing with the following key words:

Lakefront
Home
South
Jackson, MI
Water
Property
West
Ann Arbor Michigan

Cache Keyword Smearing

Now have you ever noticed when you get search engine results in Google and you click on the cache instead of the actual website link, it shows you keywords on the page highlighted, but also words that don't even appear on the page, but rather are present in links that point to the page. Well that got me thinking that if Google is keeping track of keywords for that page that aren't even on the page, then aren't keywords that used to be on the page also data about the page that isn't on the page? In other words, just because I take the term "Real Estate" out of the title, possibly that history still helps Google weight the page - at least for a while - a little stronger for the term "Real Estate", even after the word is gone, especially when the page still says "Real Estate" in three other places.

Admittedly this "sticky history" idea is just a theory of mine, but as well as my folks humble website has done locally against many bigger players, it's one of my theories as to why. Since I haven't seen any reference to this idea out there yet, I'll call this Cache Keyword Smearing. I may be behind as I haven't had much time to read lately, so if anyone has read any other articles on it let me know.


Natural Link Smearing

Now if you like to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) like I do, then your probably familiar with the term "Natural Link", which means that you put a hyperlink behind some text, but also typically the text of a paragraph, or some other larger stream of thought or communication. When you link that way, search engines - assuming everything is above board - tend to associate those keywords that are linked with the web page that they point to. So, if for example, I say I have one sponsor on one of my websites that has a really cool tool for helping people with arthritis open pill bottles , then the keywords tool, helping, people, arthritis, open, pill, and bottles all become associated with that site in any search engine that finds that inbound link.

Well back to Real Estate. I created an RSS feed for our listings, and this is what made me realize that I needed a "title" since title and article body tend to be two key fields in rss, and atom for that matter. For those people not familiar, rss and atom are two xml based standards for sharing data across the Internet. Anyway, I decided while I was at it that I might as well create two "titles" instead of one, since it wouldn't be much harder. Then I could use one title on the actual listing page, and in the page title, and use the other title for the rss feed. Now when most rss sites display an rss item, its typical (and courtesy) to hyperlink the title back to the actual page on the original site. So now I have some natural linked keywords out there on some rss feed sites with extra keywords that may or may not overlap the keywords in the page title. Finally, I go in to the listings every so often and swap the titles once in a while. I think of this as Natural Link Smearing.

What does a search engine do when title keywords and link leywords keep disappearing and reappearing? Would a search engine like Google actually remember the old title and link keywords and continue to weight your page on them to some extent, even after it's read the new keywords? What does it do when it sees these link and title keywords being swapped? Only the folks at Google know for sure, but with all the talk about the sand box - and the delayed effect getting stuff into Google, why would the logic work any different at getting stuff out?

My Favorite Real Estate Listing Posting Sites

Well, I've been meaning to write more about great sites to post listings on, and rate them, but in order to do it you have to do some homework and it takes a little time to post on a bunch of different sites. Well, my folks recently received a really nice luxury lake home and I really wanted to help them promote it, so I was out hoofing it in cyberspace as it were, trying to help them promote this particular listing. In the process, I revisited quite a few real estate posting sites, and I thought that I'd better do my critique now while they were fresh in my mind. I've tried to list them as much as possible in order from most favorite to least favorite, and list what I like about them and/or didn't like. All of the basic services on the sites below is free.

craigslist.org - Well, for a while craigslist was on my back burner list as I'd had some problems with them, but I tried them out again the other day and the listing I put in was fairly easy to do an worked quite well. Great features of craigslist include:
- They get lots of traffic
- They don't require a userid or password, just your email address
- Their listings are all exposed to the search engines
- They allow for some html in your description, including links to your listing on your own
site, and you can use natural linking , which mean you can hyperlink keywords, which
is important.
- craigslist also has an rss output feed, further increasing the potential for the distribution of your listing, but it only provides titles, no detail. craigslist isn't specific to Real Estate.

backpage.com - backpage is fairly similar to craigslist in most ways except that they probably don't have quite as much traffic as craigslist. Also they don't have quite as many Michigan cities as craigslist, and really only list major metropolitan areas. One thing that is better about backpage though is that they send email renewals allowing you to renew your listings, where they expire on craigslist and you'd have to repost. Also their rss output feed appears to have a bit more content than craigslist. backpage isn't specific to real estate.

trulia.com - I haven't really tied to post to trulia manually, but fortunately they specify an xml format that they will accept, so if you can write a routine to output the data in the proper xml format, you can load your listings to trulia automatically. Whats even better is that, once they have the address of the xml page on your website, they will hit the page regularly and automatically update you listtings on their site based on whats on your site. My hats off to trulia for this setup. With more of this going on on the Internet, traditional MLS systems beware. Trulia also has a strong mapping system. Trulia is a Real Estate only site, and also has an rss output feed.

edgeio.com - edgeio, like trulia also allows you to provide a web address of an edgeio custom xml version of your listing content, and also automatically refreshes it. I had some trouble getting this working recently, and couldn't find the support link on their site, but when I posted her on my blog they read it the next day (gee, someone reads my blog) and helped me right away the next day. edgeio isn't specific to Real Estate.

base.google.com - google base is another site that allows you to load all your listings via a custom xml feed. Unlike trulia and edgeio however, google will expire your listings every 31 days and forces you to manually reload them. If you have the software written to produce the xml file then its only 10 minutes work a month to reload your listings to google base. If you forget to do it they'll still expire and dissappear though. I wish they set thiers up like trulia and edgeio and refresh it from my website directly. One cool thing about google base is that it will give you stats on how often your listings arte being displayed and viewed. trulia and edgeio may have that feature and I just haven't noticed yet.

expo.live.com - I tried expo a couple times recently and had pretty good luck with it in terms of ease of posting. expo live is microsofts answer to the classified website market. They don't appear to allow for any bulk xml uploading just yet, but I did insert a listing manually and it was quite easy. They allow listings to be marked as "cool"similar to Digg, have some interface to facebook, and they show recent posts on the main page. They also show you recent listings you've view after you log on. I don't think they allowed me to put in any link to the actual listing though. I'll have to check out expo live further before I can say too much more about it, but its worth a look.

re-list4free.com - This was another site that I had good success at putting in a listing manually. It did allow me to put in a natural link back to the original listing, but didn't seem to have search engine exposure, meaning I had to submit a form to see my listings. I couldn't get to them just by clicking.

A few sites that I didn't have good luck with were propsmart.com, cytadia.us, and abetterway.com. propsmart seems to hold alot of promise, and has a strong mapping system, and I've posted there before, but I couldn't get a listing submitted because I was having problems with the zip code, and the latitude and longtitude. It was required, and I lost patience trying to figure it out. cytadia and abetterway just seemed to have to many data fields for me.

Stay tuned next time when I review oodle.com, geebo.com, and more.