Bad Week for Trulia
First the news that they’re getting beaten handily by their rivals Zillow in the traffic game (see John Cook’s post on TechFlash).
According to Zillow’s COO Spencer Rascoff, Zillow pulled in 7,529,360 visitors in January. A pretty impressive achievement.
Compounding the situation for the big T though, comes news yesterday that Trulia’s city results have dropped out of Google’s search results.
Sure enough, a search for “portland real estate” and “san francisco real estate” now returns zero Trulia results. A search for “seattle real estate” however still brings them up, but in a much lower position than they previously occupied.
No indication as to why the company was dropped from the index — though some bloggers are theorizing it was because they were penalized for their URL structure.
Regardless, dropping out of the Google index, even if it’s only temporarily, can’t be good for the company’s traffic-building attempts.
The race to try and knock Realtor.com off its perch as the #1 place for real estate related eyeballs (see 3 sites join real estate top-20 rankings) has getting really interesting lately. Yahoo, for example, has made enormous strides in taking them on, even with all the turmoil that has surrounded the company lately.
And Zillow, as evidenced by its strong January showing, is obviously not content playing in third place either. They want a shot at the title.
Interestingly, their impressive January numbers were, according to John Cook, also as a result of some SEO fiddling undertaken by the company.
I heard from a real estate source this week that Zillow has figured out some new search engine optimization techniques, which are helping to build traffic…
Let’s just hope it wasn’t the same techniques Trulia were using.
photo by faeryboots
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26 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From What Have We Learned From Zillow | Future of Real Estate Marketing | Feb 9, 2009
- From What Have We Learned From Zillow | Future of Real Estate Marketing | Feb 9, 2009
Rudy | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Some clarifications:
“No indication as to why the company was dropped from the index” – The “company” was not dropped from the index – some SRP pages are not indexing as they were before. The results are sporadic. We are still looking into it as you might imagine and have submitted an inquiry to Google via Webmaster tools. Doesn’t seem like a penalty though.
Minus a couple of hiccups, all looks fantastic for Trulia. We’re getting fantastic feedback from our Trulia Challenge – Trulia vs. Realtor.com – here http://sn.im/trulia-challenge and here –
http://sn.im/agent-genius
We just announced our amazing new MLS Advisory Board –
http://sn.im/trulia-advisoryboard . We’re moving in the right direction!
Additionally, in January, we had our highest level of engagement ever on Trulia by consumers. That’s great news for all the brokers and agents on Trulia.
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
Laguna Niguel Real Estate | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
Google penalty can be reversed easily for a big name as Trulia. Possibly, Trulia CEO can directly communicate with Matt Cutts of Google… No big deal!
Vic | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
Trulia has been skating on thin ice for a while now. Zillow could dominate the SERPs with a few minor little changes to their site’s architecture. I’m surprised they haven’t made the changes yet but I’m not complaining or anything…
Louis Cammarosano | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
Joel To be fair to trulia, Zillow got a lot of traffic from the press hysteria last month they created from their “zestimate” of the white house.Any one care about quality visitors who may be real home buyers or sellers?
Brad Carroll | Feb 5, 2009 | Reply
Nice recap. It will be interesting to see what was the cause of the drop once all this clears up. While I think Trulia can easily recover from this, it’s a great opportunity for individual agents and brokers to increase their rankings.
Jonathan Cardella | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Perhaps Trulia’s aggressive widget strategy is to blame!
We all know that they distribute widgets like in mass to Realtors and those widgets all have embedded text back links and those text links all say the same thing “city_name real estate” as anchor text and link to the city pages in question (e.x. trulia.com/ca/san-francisco). These widgets have been the backbone of their city pages link building strategy.
Is it just coincidence that the affected phrases are those on the widgets and the affected pages are the widget landing pages that those links resolve to? Me thinks not…
All it takes is Google to tweak its algo to put less weight on these links since they are clearly unnatural in growth and profile. It is highly unlikely that nearly all websites linking to another website would use the exact same high profile phrase as anchor text.
Of course, Trulia changes things up by making the Realtor input their location at time of widget download and dynamically generating the text link. None the less, when many Realtors are located in the major cities, it isn’t surprising that those cities are the ones being hit. Major cities are going to have the most unnatural link patterns and are going to stand out the most. And in areas where they haven’t aggressively promoted, they have been less affected.
No, they haven’t been dropped from the index and they aren’t necessarily being “penalized” in the traditional sense. Their widget city links are simply receiving less weight or being discounted because they are unnatural.
Eric Bramlet | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Hi Joel –
Thanks for the mention. To clarify, I’m not hypothesizing that they’ve been penalized because of their URL structure. My observation is that a specific hierarchy of pages, all named with the same URL taxonomy, have been deindexed.
The pages that have been dropped all follow this URL structure:
http://www.trulia.com/ST/city_name
These are the same pages that Trulia has historically promoted, and that have historically ranked. That they have been de-indexed indicates a penalty.
Again, thanks for the mention.
Joseph Ferrara.sellsius | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
One thing this debacle should do is make real estate agents keenly aware how important it is for THEM to build up their own Google juice on their websites and blogs and get themselves to the top spots in the search engine results and not cede that valued position to companies like Trulia by freely giving them content for Trulia to use to jump them in the SERPS. For once established at the top, Trulia becomes indispensable to the agent– read “got you by the short hairs”– and you now have to pay, thank you very much. Just one fella’s opinion.
Joel Burslem | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
@Louis – You’re probably right. But I don’t think Zillow really cares who they attract to their site. They’re just looking for eyeballs (read pageviews) for their ads.
They want to attract people who are passionate about all things real estate, not just buyers or sellers that they are trying to convert into leads.
Rudy | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Hi Joel!
Although we’re still looking into it, we’re pretty sure that this is a technical issue and not a penalty.
Rudy
Social Media Guru
Louis Cammarosano | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
@Joel
A second grader “passionate” about real estate who wants to find out the price of the White House is NOT a good visitor from the point of view of an advertiser or realtor.
If Zillow’s goal is to cast a wide net to the
real estate afficiandos who have little interest or ability to transact real estate, I would say Realtors need not be impressed.
Overland Park | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
I agree, the URL structure. Plus the fact that you have T listed below Z at the top part of your blog probably could drop them from Google by itself.
Eric Bramlet | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Louis, you’re correct that this isn’t qualified traffic, but that was killer linkbait & PR. It builds their brand, and ultimately builds great, natural links.
Louis Cammarosano | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
@eric
Thanks- So if a company can get a lot of press from respected authoritative sources irrespective of WHY they will get great links?
To use an absurd example if a company can get a lot of NY Times, WSJ coverage about that company hiring circus clowns, convicts, pornstars or something similarly “newsworthy”, they will be rewarded with good links?
Louis Cammarosano | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
It seems that if a company can manipulate the press, which in turn manipulates google, that company never has to get their hands dirty trying to game the google system….
Eric Blackwell | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
I agree with Bramlett that what Zillow did what good linkbait (lots of folks linking to the valuation of the white house..hehe look at that…bloggers spreading the word and so forth. No doubt it has the ability to build links.
But I agree with Louis that to an advertiser,or an agent, or to a lead generator, the quality of the traffic is HUGE. If I am paing in CPM (per thousand views) and am used to getting a certain quality of traffic and now that is cut in half because the site traffic soars because of a one time publicity stunt. I’m pissed. Will it sell more widgets? Doubtful. Does it cost me more? Absolutely.
Another example of this occurs when lots of people check the weather when it is really bad weather for school closings. Thousands of little Johnnies and Susy’s checking to see if schools are closed. In the last few days of the ice storm we have had here, I cannot count how many pageviews my 4 kids alone gave to the local media sites…and did not buy jack. Traffic goes through the roof and yet value to advertisers plummet.
So the bottomline for me? It was well devised to get links.And I am sure it garnered them.
But for Zillow to tout their figures in a press release as if tons of people came to their site for the value of the real estate…not so much. errr…not at all.
Eric Bramlet | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Hey Louis –
From a purely SEO perspective, yes, your example would be a good idea. People would buzz, and you would get natural links. Google doesn’t quantify good/bad links (only natural vs unnatural.) One of the oldest linkbaiting strategies is to say something controversial, piss people off, and get a bunch of links.
However, when you take into account what that strategy does to the brand, it’s not such a great idea. That’s why zillow’s zestimate of the White House was such great link bait. It builds their brand, and is interesting enough for people to link to.
Everyone has read about how great it is for your site to make it to the front page of digg. This isn’t because of the link you get from digg. At the end of the day, the actual link gets buried, and you’re lucky if it’s a pr2 after a year. It’s great to go on the front page of digg because you expose your content to tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands,) of people who are tech savvy. Out of those thousands of people, a small % link to you. Personally, I’ve gotten 2k+ links from a single digg campaign. These are good links b/c they’re editorial & natural – the exact type of links that Google says we should get.
Here’s an article Matt Cutts wrote 3 years ago on linkbaiting (that is still very relevant.) http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-linkbait-and-linkbaiting/
Here’s an example of KILLER linkbait that was actually put together by a professional SEO:
http://www.bbqaddicts.com/bacon-explosion.html
I know it’s killer linkbait b/c I mentioned it to friends and many of them (not SEOs) had already seen it. They’re getting TONS of links surrounded by text about BBQ, to a BBQ site. Google likes that.
Eric Bramlet | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
And that’s why big brands have an inherent advantage against the little guys. Granted, not as big an advantage as in the old media, but still an advantage.
David G from Zillow | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Joel –
FYI – online advertisers are typically buying performance (sales), not eyeballs. Ad products are sometimes priced on a per eyeball basis but they wouldn’t sell if they didn’t perform.
As the economy has contracted, ad buyers have focused even more on performance. Pure brand ads are few and far between. Zillow’s audience is the most affluent of all web sites with more than 3M UU’s. The average Zillow visitor earns more than the average visitor to Forbes.com. While Zillow’s audience size is impressive, the main reason our advertisers renew is because the ads are working for them.
Joel Burslem | Feb 6, 2009 | Reply
Point well taken David. Didn’t mean to disparage Zillow’s audience, only trying to point out that the way you guys make money (advertising) is very different than some other players who rely on a lead-gen model. Not better/worse, just different.
Unless I’m wrong here, Zillow wants visitors who are engaged in real estate at all stages, period. Not just those who are actively buying and selling and therefore can be monetized as a lead.
If that’s the case, stunts like zestimating the White House are perfectly valid IMO. Whether done for SEO purposes or otherwise, it got people talking about (and obviously clicking over to) Zillow.
Chris Dowell | Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
The quality of Zillow contacts is good on my website. My Zillow traffic has passed Trulia traffic and the quality is good.
I do nearly the same homes on both sites.
Rudy | Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
Quality of traffic certainly matters….
In October, a study by Threewide’s Listhub analyzed about 600k listings sent from MLSs and Brokers to 16 of the largest real estate sites. The results showed that Trulia generated the most leads during this time – approx 12,500 = more than 30% of all the client leads.
http://sn.im/trulia-leads
Update: Over the weekend, some of our cities started to mysteriously get re-indexed just as quickly as they were de-indexed. We made no changes on our end which indicates to us that
this was not a penalty, rather a technical issue.
Onward…….
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
Louis Cammarosano | Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
@Rudy
Indeed Trulia is back in the SERPS
Congrats
Nice work on the lead gen too.
Land Development Company | Feb 9, 2009 | Reply
Dropping out of the google index will really effect trulia’s traffic. Real Estate search engine rankings are a real battle ground.
If they have been re-indexed and it was just a tech issue they should be ok, however I wonder how much was lost in that time?
Good to see Trulia commenting, must be paying attention to the blogosphere! Good luck to all the players
James | Feb 10, 2009 | Reply
I guess I am also guilty of pushing the numbers. As a College Prof. I use Zillow as an example to show my students why their valuations cannot be relied on. While they claim high 90’s accuracy the viewer has no idea when the property they are looking at is in the oops zone. In either declining or rising markets the odds of accurate zestimates based on anecdotal data are not very good. The only market where there is an improved chance of accuracy is the short time at the peek or valley. Available Public Record data is also a huge factor and since these records rarely include remodeling, or in many cases recent additions, how can accurate results be obtained?
Just a few thoughts on using these computer systems for home valuations. A few decades ago an English, as in England, Professor proposed a new definition for GIGO, Garbage in Garbage Out. His change was to Garbage in Gospel Out. If the computer provides the information it just must be correct with no regard to the accuracy of the data used.
Enjoy the myth of accuracy based on faulty data.
Rudy | Feb 10, 2009 | Reply
Thanks Louis!