Should I have home listings not followed?

[AvexHomes]

Hi,

I currently am doing digital marketing for a home builder. Here is one of our challenges: we build homes, create the page to sell them, details on the house are put up, Google crawls them, and then the house sells and I need to take it off the site. This is just creating a constant redirect process that I'm OK with but I'm just thinking I'd rather have Google not know they exist and delete them.

I have community pages and floor plan pages with evergreen content and a blog that's doing well. I'm OK with Google not seeing these pages, but I'd really like to know what others in the industry do and what Moz thinks is best. I have a working theory of creating 10-15 pages where I rotate the houses: house 1 is posted and once it sells replace site content with house 16 (assuming 15 pages already exist with 15 houses).

Reason - none of my listing pages have any page authority and it overall just makes the site un-authoritative. I know the domain authority is a different ranking factor, but I need the pages to be stronger or just not there. I'd love confirmation that that shouldn't be a concern for me as it seems to be one that I've inherited through years of SEO marketing paranoia.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I would keep the homes on the site and allow them to be indexed however once they have been sold I would put them into a new category where the buyer does not have the opportunity to see them unless they try to.

If you make sure the site you ask is designed not to show them Two people looking to purchase a house that is still for sale look at companies like Zillow you can see that they keep every listing online and indexed the reason that they do that is the place no longer for sale in a very prominent part of the page including using colors to show what is on the market and what is no longer on the market.

You will have to get with your developer and figure out a way to essentially move them below the listings based on pricing or location however you should keep the URLs indexed to get as much juice as possible.

Sincerely,

Tom

[AvexHomes]

I really like that idea - thanks! To build on that - do you think that it is ok to have them as orphan pages?

I am certainly ok with the URLs stating active and updating the listing to have information that the house has been sold, but I'd really like them to not be a part of any page unless someone has the link bookmarked or something. If it shows up in a Google search, that's fine too, but not just as a part of the site that anyone can navigate to.

Thoughts?

[WebElaine]

It wouldn't be hard to add custom postmeta to the "home" post type - a simple flag called "inactive." When you create a new home or update one, it would by default be unchecked - meaning the listing is active. Once it sells, you check the box to make inactive = true. From there, you just edit your theme (child theme or custom theme). The easiest way to ensure a link to the inactive listings won't appear anywhere, no matter what type of page you're on - archive/search/etc. - would be to add a filter to the main query. If the post type is "home", add a meta query that searches for "inactive == false". You'd then customize the "single-home.php" theme file - check whether inactive is false; if it's false go ahead and display all the details, but if inactive is true remove the price, add a "not for sale" banner, that type of thing.

This way your home URLs never change, so nobody has to set up redirects, but it's also dead simple to mark a listing inactive and have it disappear from navigation. Yet it still is indexable by Google, it will still appear in your XML sitemap if you're generating one automatically, and people who have bookmarked the listing and return to the page will immediately see that this house is sold. You might even want to use a related posts plugin so that if the house is sold, visitors (and spiders) will see links to related houses that are still for sale. That will give you even a bit more link juice out of your old pages, because they'll be funneling spiders to the newer pages, and they'll also help spider AIs determine which content is the most related.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think that you should link to them from the new homes as long as the relevant. So if I live at 1313 Mockingbird Ln. and 1210 Mockingbird Ln. comes up as a sold home I want to know what it sold for I want to be able to get an idea of what people are paying in the neighborhood. So I would not make them into orphans I would have them linked from the new homes and when the new home sell keep the link so they're not orphans they're just helpful data.

I created a video for you it's narrated hopefully this is helpful.

https://cl.ly/pARo

Here is an example of a home that is no longer for sale but is still linked to.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Fairview-Shores-FL-32789/pmf,pf_pt/46069084_zpid/72217_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/28.721152,-81.230851,28.490268,-81.553917_rect/11_zm/

I hope that helps,

Thomas

[AvexHomes]

Yes - I think that would definitely be a way to go especially creating more link juice out of the sold listings. The related posts plugin idea is golden and I've been trying to think of spicing up the sidebar because as of now it's none existant. I will incorporate that part for sure.

[AvexHomes]

Thanks - super helpful. We are home builders so once a home sells there isn't pricing updated or anything since they are almost custom houses after they are sold. The traditional information that would be enticing for potential buyers/sellers in a neighborhood isn't on our site, unfortunately.

[BlueprintMarketing]

You know what I don't know if this is something you would like to do or not considering your a custom home builder and I just finished up a custom home I purchased in New Hampshire I have a lot of respect for your craft.

I think you can get that information at a very low price and also give your site a little bit more appeal to end-users if you use walkscore.com  you can get data if you think it would benefit your site. If not I would simply leave the pricing off of the site entirely I'm assuming that because everything is a custom home everyone is a different price and they are purchasing the land on their own already. I am certain that you advise them. So you really want to show off what you have accomplished with these past homes that you've built. I would definitely keep the photographs and add video if you do not have them. I know when I look at homes I like to be able to see as much as possible and if I'm looking for a builder I want to see a lot of trust signals and past work.

https://www.walkscore.com/professional/research.php

https://www.walkscore.com/professional/

I would also definitely crawl with Moz & deepcrawl you want to make certain that if somebody linked to one of your homes for sale that you keep that link equity as well.

I would definitely make sure that they are visible and show off what you are proud of.

Hope that was of help,

Tom