Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jane:

Great observation regarding listing pages on real estate sites!! It is very difficult for me to add unique content for hundreds of listings. There are only so many ways to describe an office or loft space. Writing more than 150-200 words per listing is difficult since the product is generic. So what is the best way around this? My SEO provider suggested I "no-index" these pages. But I am concerned about non-indexing 300 of my product pages, concerned that Google would view 300 no-index on a 650 page site as suspect, like I am trying to hide something.

My SEO provider believes that we were hit by Penguin 1.0 in April 2012. Traffic dropped about 60% at that point. It recovered in October partially as there was a Google update at that time. It has dropped in the last two months, with the drop accelerating as an upgrade of the site was launched in June.

I think my SEO firm is discouraging further SEO as I am maxed out financially after spending more than $25,000 on SEO, coding, design in the last 8 months with nothing to show for it.  They may think I hold them accountable (I do, I expect some results eventually) so they are not encouraging me to move forward. I find it very discouraging that after such a major effort there are no results. Maybe results can be achieved but I would need to budget $50,000-$100,000 to get some momentum. But that is out of the question unfortunately.

Hi Martijn:

Thanks for the response!! A few questions:

-What do I do about real estate listing pages? It is difficult to create a 400 word description for an office. I guess I could beef up the content to maybe 150 words but the language will be similar.

-We had many toxic links removed in the last 60 days so maybe that is  creating the drop. Which will be a faster way to create quality links: post high quality content on our blog or solicit links? I am very surprised my SEO company did not choose to go down this road initially.

Thanks for your assistance. Alan

Hi EGOL:

There is certainly a verifiable, correct answer. Question is how to obtain it. I tend to agree with you, I think some technical issue is going on. My SEO company may or may not have their own agenda or may have over looked this.  The jump to 851 pages from 675 in the Google Index in early June is really suspicious. The site map only contains 635 pages.  So seems technical. Question is what to I attempt to fix first and at what cost.

In any case, thanks again!!! Alan

• Hi Egol:
  I understand. But I am trying to prioritize what needs to be done first. I have spent about $40,000 in the last 8 months on a series of SEO audits, coding, wireframes without any improvement.  Implementing all the suggestions made in the SEO audits. Don't want to continue to waste resources without generating results. 
  Regarding technical issues, with all due respect, my SEO provider (MOZ approved) disagrees with you. An excerpt form their message to me yesterday below. So based on their suggestions it may make sense to focus on content, but I am not sure, which is why I have posted to this forum. Sorry if my questions overlap at times, but this is so technical that it is better to be safe than sorry. I see that you respond often to these posts and I really appreciate the time you take to respond in such a thorough manner.

• XXXX is not overly concerned that technical/indexation issues are at the heart of the SEO issues. We are seeing conflicting indexation numbers from Google (see screenshot) showing 442 results with an "omitted results" message from Google. Additionally GWT reports conflicting index numbers depending on what report you use: Some at 843, other reports in the 539 range. Also, keep in mind that there has yet to be a Penguin update and therefore Google may not be accounting for some of the positive things that were done in past months.

• Your developers appear to handling things correctly with the no index issues of listings pages, but we did find the following indexed pages:

• Subdomain listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com has 37 pages indexed.

• There are other irrelevant pages indexed on the www subdomain (20-30+), such as:

• http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/fs-real-estate-plugin/xml/marker_listings.php?sort=all&ps=18

• http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/fs-real-estate-plugin/xml/marker_listings.php?sort=all&ps=20

• The /listings/search? pages are out of Google's index (this is a good thing).

• Per our recommendations from our last meeting, you should probably noindex,follow /listings/ pages that have 'stock' (duplicate) content, do not drive much traffic and are low quality pages etc. We outlined this strategy in the deck we provide from our last meeting.

• Most of your building pages have 80%+ bounce rates: This obviously is a content issue (e.g. no listings for people to view/click on the building page), and this is also an SEO issue (Google does take into account bounce rates from your pages back to the SERPs).

• Traffic dropped by about 10-15% on 5/19 when Panda 4 came out (see attached screenshot showing drop in Google/Organic traffic on May 20 -- Panda update was May 19). The loss in traffic is probably from lower rankings on some extremely high converting keywords, which would explain the general drop in leads/inquiries/etc. Bottom line, you need to improve content. However, as we've said in the past, there is no guarantee with just a content marketing based approach and it could take months to recover. Thus, content improvement via conversion optimization is the best approach in order to generate more immediate business and still provide longer term organic traffic growth. We could supplement traffic with PPC to generate more immediate traffic, but this is not worth doing until the website is improved since it would likely be wasted money.

Hi Lesley:

A visual web optimizer is something like Optimizely?

What is a modal pop up?

Thanks, Alan

After 6 months of effort with an SEO provider, the results of our campaign have been minimal. we are in the process of reevaluating our effort to cut costs and improve ROI.  Our site is for a commercial real estate brokerage in New York City.

Which of these options would have the best shot of creating results in the not too long term future:

-Create a keyword matrix and optimize pages for specific terms. Maybe optimize 50 pages.
-Add content to "thin" pages. Rewrite 150-250 listing and building pages.
-Audit user interface and adjust the design of forms and pages to improve conversions.
-Link building campaign to improve the link profile of a site with not many links (most of those being of low quality).

I would really like to do something about links, but have been told this will have no effect until the next "Penguin refresh". In fact I have been told the best bet is to improve user interface since it is becoming increasingly difficult to improve ranking.

Any thoughts? Thanks, lan

My site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a real estate web site.

The product pages are listing pages such as

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/303-broadway-building-office-sublet-11189sf

If a visitor wants further info they must click the “Interested In This Space, Contact a Broker Button”. They then directed to a form like:

http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/contact-us?from_listing=303-broadway-building-office-sublet-11189sf

Conversion rates are bad. Not many visitors complete this form.

Would conversion rates improve if we provided 5-6 clickable options beneath the listing photo, options, such as “Send Me Floorplans”,  “Send Me More Photos”, Tell Me About Off Market Listings”, “Show Me This Space”?  In order to receive this info visitors would need to release their email, company name and name. We would remove the “Interested In This Space, Contact a Broker Button” and somehow display these options instead.

I would think that placing these options immediately beneath the listing photo would induce higher conversions rather than forcing the visitor to go to an additional form. These items are pretty useful, so visitors have an incentive to provide basic info.

Does this seem like a reasonable assumption?

Also, is there a clean, elegant way to display these options, maybe a pop up rather than designing these options into the listing page?

Thanks everyone!! Alsn

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Greetings MOZ Community?

I manage a commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com).

Visitors view listings (for example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/303-broadway-building-office-sublet-11189sf). If they want more details they click on the "Interested In This Space, Contact a Broker" button. They get directed to a contact us form like: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/contact-us?from_listing=303-broadway-building-office-sublet-11189sf

We are redesigning this form. Remove much of the text and allowing the visitor to check questions pertaining to the property, like "Schedule a Tour", "Get Floorplans", "Details on Similar Space'.

Currently this conversion form is on its own URL, and as such has menus on top, which I am concerned could distract the visitor. Would we get better conversions if this form was a Java script pop up with no menus. That way there would be no distraction for the visitor and we would have a better chance of converting them. Any thoughts?

Also, we are using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to track conversions. Would changing to a Java Script pop up form have any implications for tracking?

Thanks everyone!!! Alan

Hi Marie:

Thanks for your quite detailed response to my question. Some of the possibilities you mention probably don't apply for the following reasons:

1. None of the URLs' changed, so it cannot be that.

2. Page titles did not change, so it's not that.

3. As for unnatural links, these have existed for several years. In fact we succeeded in getting 28 our of 100 removed and made a disavow request for Google for the other 80 toxic links. While the link profile is weak it is not worse than what it was before.

When the upgrade was launched in early June Wordpress was upgraded to the latest version. I wonder if at that time some issue did not develop with robot txt or no-index. I find it very curious if that a removal request was made for the 175 URLs on June then the number of indexed pages went down for a few days and now they are back to 851.

My developer may be a little bit shy about accepting responsibility about this issue. Is there any source, a Guru or sorts that could check the Wordpress installation to see if that is the source of the 175 appearing on Google that should not be there? Someone way to eliminate any doubt about what is causing this issue?

Thanks, Alan

Hi Joe:

Thanks for your response!!

My site is kind of dead in the water at the moment. It is my primary lead generation tool so this is very bad. Do you think that getting social media likes shares and links on Twitter and Facebook will work faster that acquiring links? Also what do you mean by using "an absolute domain" for social media posts? At the moment I take the URLS and have them reduced by Bitly so they are not as long. Is that OK? Also, on Twitter I always use #OfficeSpace at the end of the Tweet, is that best practice?

Regarding building links, do you think this would occur naturally if I add high quality blog posts or do you think it best if I somehow solicit these links? Can I develop these links myself or am I better off hiring an online marketing firm to generate them?

On a global basis I am a bit puzzled regarding how links work and when the effect ranking. My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year. So I am puzzled that my ranking has dropped after links have been removed, because there has not been an update. By the same token I have been told even if I build links that will have no effect until the next Penguin update. Am I understanding this correctly?

Best, Alan

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On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then.

The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site.

My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline.

My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking?

My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday.

At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball.

Thanks everyone!! Alan

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Hi Joseph:

Thanks so much for your response!

Our DA and PA numbers were a lot better in the past. Domain Authority was around 35 last September.

Since November I took the following steps that were suppose to help according to my SEO provider:

-Ran Copyscape report on site and got rid of about 12 pages of partially duplicate content. Page count for our site is 650 pages.

-A former developer had a mirror site that was indexed by Google. We had that removed.

-We used a 3rd party listing source that had thousands of pointed thousands of alpha numeric URLs to our site. We removed these links.

-In April we requested that about 100 domains remove toxic links to our site. About 30 complied. We disavowed the rest. We followed Google's SEO best practices, so I am very puzzled by the drop in DA and PA.

Any ideas???

Thanks, Ala

Greetings:

Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.

Key MOZ metric are as follows:

Domain Authority: 23
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links.

In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics.

Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future?

Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky

Is there a risk to no-indexing the listing pages? Thanks, Alan

Hi Benjamin:

I think your suggestions are excellent. However from a practical point of view there are 350 listings so it is a lot of work to beef them all up.

Once visitors are on the site and they run listing searches, the click thru rate is pretty good, but the problem is more with Google, that many listing are not indexed and they don't generate many clicks.

My SEO company suggests deindexing them because they don't generate much click thru and the high bounce rate may be harming our overall indexing. They are of the opinion that it is best to focus on improving content on categories of pages that have a high click thru rate like neighborhoods and types of space, deindexing listings (I don't know how 350 no indexes would look to Google) and displaying the listings in more appealing manner like in lists and maps.

As for video, do you think that would attract more interest than photos?

Thanks,Alan

Hi Prestashop:

I am a commercial real estate broker, so no Zillow or anything comparable in my industry.

If I were to beef up the listing content, would 200-300 words be enough? Should I add some H2 tags and headings?

There are 350 listings, so it is a lot of work if it going to be professionally written.

Thanks,
Alan

Thanks Prestashop, Benjamin, Devanur!In principal I understand it is better to beef up content, however the listings get rented quickly. They take 30-60 minutes each to create these pages between the content, tags and photos.

They all get rented within a few weeks to a few months, there is major turn over. So it would be extremely labor intensive to write elaborate content for each.

Furthermore it means that it makes it very difficult to add a lot of listings because of the amount of content if I have to take ranking and amount of content into account each time I write a listing.

Is there any risk that Google would penalize the site by setting these listings to "No-Index"? It would make thing easier.

It may make more sense to add content to the building pages as they are permanent and there are only 150 of them.

Thoughts??

Thanks,
Alan

Greetings Moz Community:

As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories:

1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan)  25 PAGES Low bounce rate

2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space) 
15 PAGES Low bounce rate.

3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take 
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate

4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space)  High bounce rate
3 PAGES

5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate

6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content

7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES  Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%)

Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words.  My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me.

Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us.

Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well?

Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"?

Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site?

I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google  that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains.

Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan

My developer's response below, he justifies the 36 hours. Objectively is he being fair?

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Hi Alan

We are working to audit all tickets with the team but for sure we charged you the time we needed to complete the requested tasks, no more than that. I know that also because we worked more time than that. In our statistics, in the last 3 months we billed the 85% of the hours we worked on your project (which is below our average).

The time spent integrating the new GTM code was 3 hours. You can check that in this ticket http://tracker.serfe.com/view.php?id=25019 [^]

The rest of the time was invest to research issues and fixes for proper operation of the GTM code. I think it is not fair to blame us for those problems

- The server had a configuration that was braking the entire website, this was due to GTM code (not us)

- The GTM code was not compatible with the Wordpress plugin we installed at the beginning of the project. Why we used that plugin? Because it was the only one in that moment which offered a contact us page where messages are sent via email and stored in the database at same time without too much customization.

If we were using another popular plugin we possibly would be having the same troubles, because the GTM code conflict raised due to the attached javascript events (validation and ajax requests)

We followed instruction from SEO firm, who should provide the solution to improve the SEO but we didn't received anything to improve for more than 4 weeks, any thought about the 200 links (again, it is not fair you blame us for that, and we fixed the problem 24hs after you warn us about that). From a development perspective we did always our best for your project, we always offered to you a solution and helped to improve the website. From a SEO perspective, this is quite hard to evaluate our work, even when we did everything what we should do, the result is not what you expected, again we didn't hear from the SEO firm providing any direction to help on that.

We find the problem with the form, you were probably losing leads due to not receive any contact message and we fixed it (Todd never realized about that I think or at least he did't warn)

We never used GTM before because we always install regular Google Analytic and that is pretty enough for all clients to manage the business and marketing decisions. Then, we had to research on the large GTM documentation to be able to help Todd to find a proper solution. At this point, we can not migrate to another Wordpress plugin to create Contact form because this involve to change design, the automatic actions and emails template all over again for the new plugin.

A priori, we could never estimate how long we may need to fix all the conflict raising due to GTM, and that is because we always tried to keep you posted but with a very high uncertainty on that.

About the visitor form, we didn't billed 8 hours to change the text and background color, you can see in the ticket http://tracker.serfe.com/view.php?id=25431 [^] Diego needed to work on local environment, update Beta, get back to you, check screenshots, work on local and update Beta a few times, fix issues with the format based on the web design, review HTML code and improve H1 and content, test across all browsers and devises (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE8, IE9, IE10, IE11, iPhone, iPad, Android, etc) as well as ensure that you would be able to change the content without lose the format in the future, there is no way to complete all that under 30 minutes.

I can't answer about what you researched with other developers, as I mentioned we estimated 3 hours to integrate GTM and that was what we charged in ticket 0025019 but unfortunately we faced lots of troubles after that.

We spent a lot of time to help you with this task and troubles, we worked really hard for that, even Sebastian worked up to 10pm a few days in order to keep the website working correctly. We charge for that time and also for the phone call because it takes us time too, others companies may charge time "just in case" and then they "don't charge the call" but you may pay for that anyway. In our case, you pay for the work and the time of calls because this is totally transparent, we provide this information to you because we are 100% sure about our work and the time it takes.

I hope you can see and appreciate all all our work, so you can understand that we charged just for that time. But if you think this is not reasonable, I don't see other option than offer to you the alternative to find another provider as we can not work for free to fix issues that are not coming from our end.

At this moment i see 2 alternatives:

1) Based on this explanation,  tell me what would be the reasonable number of hours that the elance invoice should have so you can pay an amount that you are comfortable with. Please note that as we can not work without being paid, then on this option you will have to find other provider to continue working on your site.

2. We continue working based on the agreement that we make on our call (we work without your confirmation on hours only on urgent tasks, on the rest, we need your confirmation to move forward) in that case you will only be billed for every hour that you approved.

Of course that we really want to continue working with you so i hope you decide to go with option 2. On the other hand i want you to be comfortable with your decision. If you think that the best would be to try other provider then no problem, we will understand. We definitively don't want to disturb. We always want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

Please, let me know what you think.

Regards,

Hi Prestashop:

Thanks for your excellent response!!

Perhaps I have not made it clear that the coders did not configure GTM. They installed the code on Wordpress, allowing it to work with 2-3 forms, making it compatible with all security settings on the server.

I  paid my online marketing company $750 to configure goals on GTM (Not actions, they will be configures another time and for another $750).

So my programmers took 36 to get GTM working on my site (no setting up of goals).

Please confirm that you understand that the developers role was to get GTM working on the server not to configure it. In this scenario you still view 36 hours of labor as within the realm of the possible and reasonable?

Thanks, Alan