Lakefront Homes as low as they will probably get

It looks like Lake front homes are at very nice prices for people looking to buy these days. While prices may stay low for another year or two, it's also possible that they won't, especially here in Michigan where the Auto industry may be poised for a comeback. So if you've been waiting for the right time to buy that special lakehouse, be carefull how long you wait. As we say where I grew up, "there's only so much lake front"

Handling Obsolete Listings

I've been wondering for sometime about coming up with a better way to handle obsolete listings. When I originally set up the site, it only had the companies listings. When a listing became obsolete, the site was set up to display an index of listings when that particular page address was requested. When I started adding MLS listings, I did something similar. At first, the MLS Listings received good traffic through Google search, but it's tapered off. My suspicion is that, since all these page addresses eventually point to the same content, that Google is penalizing me for that. Likewise, I don't just want to throw out a "page not found" message for someone coming to the site. So I'm looking for alternatives. I think I might try adding the Google Canonical tag.

Where's the Date

I'm trying to figure out how to display the date on my blog comments. I can only see the time. Is the assumption that all comments would be same day?? Strange. If anyone can shed light on that for me please let me know.

Google Maps now has Real Estate Listings

If you hadn't noticed, Goggle Maps now has Real Estate Listings. To see what listings they have in the area your interested, go to http://maps.google.com and double click the map repeatedly to zoom in to the area your interested in. Next, click on the button titled "more". There should be a check box there that says "Real Estate" that you can check.



And here's a live link to this
Southern Michigan Google Real Estate Map

Here's how it looks as an iframe on your site:

View Larger Map

My First IFRAME, and it wasn't for Real Estate

I know IFRAMES gets used alot in Real Estate to display MLS listings, but I opted for a direct data feed with mine, so I never used IFRAMES for Real Estate Listings. Another opportunity came up for one of my other websites when a local paper asked if there was a way they could display trivia quizzes from another site that Innovative Ambitions owns. I thought of IFRAMES and went to work to see what I could come up with. This is just a rough first pass test, but let's see what it looks like. Here's a try at displaying one of our recent popular quizzes: Autumn Songs.

Even Google isn't perfect

Well, as I posted previously, my clients Real Estate website was dropped from the Google index early in 2008. The site had been hacked and had some blackhat SEO stuff added. I didn't catch it for a month or 2, then spent a couple more fixing and requesting reconsideration with Google. The pages went back into the index, and all was well. The clients site started coming up 1st for searches on "Remerica Somerset Realty". Case closed. Or so I thought.

Then late last year, or early this year, I noted something else. All the images at remericasomersetrealty.com had been dropped from the google image search index. Or at least thats all I can figure. Prior to the hack last spring the images from the site could be found in Google image search.

My assumption is that its not an issue with the Google algorythym, but rather with the Google re-inclusion process. I can't be sure, but when you have a site whose url is remericasomersetrealty.com, and it says "Remerica Somerset Realty" in the page title of the front page, and the upper left corner of every page on the site has an image whose filename is "remerica_somerset_realty.jpg" and the alt tag says "Remerica Somerset Realty" and the text on the actual image says "Remerica Somerset Realty", and the image shows up nowhere in Goggle image search results, but the site still shows up #1 for "Remerica Somerset Realty" in Google standard search, then I'd say that there's a relavency issue with this image search result, especially when you look at the other image search results that come up. And alot of them page 1 are nothing to write home about.

To be fair though, the Google system is extremely huge and dynamic, and everything can't possibly be fixed manually so I don't really fault Google. I just wish I could find a way to get my images back in the Google image search index. There's a process, and I've written them twice in the last 4 months, and been given no timeframe on how fast these requests get considered. :)