What should happen to expired real estate listings?
-
For a real estate website, when a house is sold or taken off of the market. What should happen to the listing? 301 redirect it to the grouping (such as zip code or city) which that listing resides in? 404 it?
-
Do you let the old URLs 404 or do you redirect them?
-
So after a year or two there would be thousands of 301 redirects - would you eventually delete these after a year or two?
-
I'd usually say redirect it to a category page (zip code or city) straight away but from a users point of view it may not be the best thing to do. Maybe leave the page up with a sold sign and then have a "you may also like" section underneath so they know the house is gone but there are some other options, probably the best for UX. After a few weeks, I'd then 301 it to a category page.
-
What I do (I also work on a real estate website):
Short-term (maybe one or two weeks): Leave as is but have a "sold" banner over the listing.
Afterwards: Delete it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My website is my name. Overnight it went from being the number one google search to not showing up at all when you google my name. Why would this happen?
I built my website via square space. It is my name. If you google my name it was the number one hit. Suddenly 2 weeks ago it doesn't show up AT ALL. I went through square spaces SEO check list, secured my site etc. Still doesn't show up. Why would this happen all of the sudden and What can I do? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbark0 -
Suggestions on Link Auditing a 70,000 URL list?
I have a website with nearly 70,000 incoming links, since its a somewhat large site that has been online for 19 years. The rate I was quoted for a link audit from a reputable SEO professional was $2 per, and clearly I don't have $140,000 to spend on a link audit 🙂 !! I was thinking of asking you guys for a tutorial that is the Gold Standard for link auditing checklists - and do it myself. But then I thought maybe its easier to shorten the list by knocking out all the "obviously good" links first. My only concern is that I be 100% certain they are good links. Is there an "easiest approach" to take for shortening this list, so I can give it to a professional to handle the rest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk0 -
Best Way to Optimize 38 Local Directory Listing In Major Directories
Hi Folks, I am trying to figure out the best way to get our company's 38 U.S. locations in the major local directories. To start, I'd like to get us listed in the major ones: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. I do have the resources myself here on staff to do everything manually. So, I don't necessarily need a service like Yext (but would also like any opinions on that offering if anyone can offer it). But, from what I know in the past, every time you try to claim a local listing within each platform, you have to confirm your existence there somehow - whether it be by a mailed postcard or some sort of automated call they give you. Considering that we want to manage all social and local platforms here at corporate, how can we do this? I am not physically at these locations, but I'm sure this is possible to manage everything through one account. The addresses will be local, but the phone numbers on each local profile will route to our customer service here at corporate because the local locations are mostly administrative. In other words, businesses is booked through corporate and carried out at local destinations. Thoughts/Comments?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSawatzky
I want to do what's best for SEO and also dont' want to harm anything or our link equity. Thanks,
Pedram0 -
Optimizing WordPress Pages With List of Posts
A friend of mine has published a new site called www.localsguidesa.com. It is an informational/review site about a resort town. Most of my experience has been dealing with single html pages. In the case of this site, the main "money keyword" pages are mainly an introduction of text followed by a list and snipped of blog posts such as this page http://localsguidesa.com/what-to-see-do/attractions which would target St Augustine Attractions. Would she be better off making the main pages with more content and less blog posts? How would ranking be affected with all the preview blog posts on the page? The strategy is for the blog posts to rank on the longer tail keywords...such as "Top 10 Attractions in St Augustine ", but what suggestions would you have for a main navigation page such as http://localsguidesa.com/what-to-see-do/attractions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pinlaser1 -
What Sources to use to compile an as comprehensive list of pages indexed in Google?
As part of a Panda recovery initiative we are trying to get an as comprehensive list of currently URLs indexed by Google as possible. Using the site:domain.com operator Google displays that approximately 21k pages are indexed. Scraping the results however ends after the listing of 240 links. Are there any other sources we could be using to make the list more comprehensive? To be clear, we are not looking for external crawlers like the SEOmoz crawl tool but sources that would be confidently allow us to determine a list of URLs currently hold in the Google index. Thank you /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0 -
Fixing scattered incorrect NAP for Local Listings
I have several clients who have old addresses scattered around the search engines. Correcting them all individually is extremely time consuming and I'm looking into services like Yext and Localeze, but they tend to be fairly pricey. Does Localeze actually end up correcting most of the random listings? Is there any other services I should be aware of? Thanks! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBristol0 -
How would you optimize a web site for a NYC real estate brokerage with apartment rentals and apartment sales?
I would think it would make the most sense to optimize the homepage for 'NYC apartments'. Then have two pages, one for 'apartment rentals' and another for 'apartment sales' directly underneath in the site's hierarchy. Is this is how you would do it? The competition for these keywords mostly have 'NYC Apartment Rentals' and 'NYC Apartment Sales' bunched together on their homepage. Is it possible to have 3 separate pages from the same domain rank on the first SERP? Also, the company I work for is called Platinum Properties. If we fail to include 'Platinum Properties' in the title tag would that negatively effect our current position for 'Platinum Properties' in the search results? What would be an effective way to get listed for both the keyword and company name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | platinumseo0