Should I have home listings not followed?
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Here is an example of a home that is no longer for sale but is still linked to.
I hope that helps,
Thomas
-
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.
-
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?
-
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
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
-
Removing massive number of no index follow page that are not crawled
Hi, We have stackable filters on some of our pages (ie: ?filter1=a&filter2=b&etc.). Those stacked filters pages are "noindex, follow". They were created in order to facilitate the indexation of the item listed in them. After analysing the logs we know that the search engines do not crawl those stacked filter pages. Does blocking those pages (by loading their link in AJAX for example) would help our crawl rate or not? In order words does removing links that are already not crawled help the crawl rate of the rest of our pages? My assumption here is that SE see those links but discard them because those pages are too deep in our architecture and by removing them we would help SE focus on the rest of our page. We don't want to waste our efforts removing those links if there will be no impact. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitics0 -
Home page ranks for most keywords with no SEO
Hi Guys, The keyword I am trying to rank is on seperate page with its own Optimization in place. However the HOME page of website starts ranking for that keywords . The keyword is mentioned on Home page Just once in content description, that's all. What should be my ideal strategy. Deleting the Sub Page, will that improve the SEO of my home page and improve the Rank for that keyword ? Also I can see my Own YELP pages rank better than the actual website for few terms . Any way around this ? A Part from building links to page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00071 -
Whats the best way to set up a directory listing website
Hello all, I am building a website that lists homeschool events and field trips across various states (locker-time.com) and I have a few questions on setting it up correctly. Both the events and field trips are searchable by distance. For clarification, events are associated with a specific date and time and field trips are not. I currently have a link that says homeschool events and you enter your zip to find things close by. Is it better to create a separate page for each state I am targeting instead? So the link would be homeschool events and then a sub-link that says homeschool events in GA and the GA page brings up all the events in GA, still searchable by zip. Or does it matter? I was thinking if its a separate page, I could put keyword rich copy on top, but then clicking on the menu and choosing the appropriate sub-menu is an additional step for users on the site and as the number of states increase, that sub-menu could get pretty big. The search results pages lists the post title of any events or field trips found and the links go to a page on my website with more information, such as the location, details on the event / field trip and a link to their website. I am wondering for SEO purposes, is this the right way to do it? Or I could set up the results page to show an excerpt and some listing info and then link directly to their website. Does it matter? I was thinking a page on my own website since then I could add images (but that might end up sucking up all my hosting space). As I am adding these listings to my website, I simply copied/pasted the details on the event. Now that I'm thinking about it, original content is best, so should I stop doing that and rewrite the description in my own words? Since the events are date specific events and when they pass, they are no longer on the site, does it matter as much for the events? The field trips do not have dates associated with them, so I can probably work on creating my own descriptions for those. Just not sure if I should bother with events that are more short term. Thanks in advance for ANY advice or suggestions. I'm so looking forward to getting this all set up correctly! I find working on this SEO stuff such fun! Jeanette
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fatcreat0 -
Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?
I know it is a good idea for duplicate pages, blog tags, etc. but I remember somewhere that you can help the overall link juice of a website by adding no index no follow or no index follow low quality content pages of your website. Is it still a good idea to do this or was it never a good idea to begin with? Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock0 -
Doubt with no follow links: disavow or no action?
We have a google penalty (artificial links) we have checked our link profile with link detox, and we found that a group of links that has no follow tag have been classified as toxic (stats websites mostly). But should we remove those links or what? They are no follow, it shoud be enough. Should we include this links on the spreadsheet anyway? Should we include and add "no action taken"? How would you proceed in that case? Note: I know link detox is not great, but it helped us to collect data. But we have now to make decisions about the results, and I'm new on this and I have doubts. I would appreciate your help Thank you!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
How to redirect whole site to home page without breaking wordpress
Hi all I had a phpprobid site which was heavily indexed but got hacked. I have deleted the old site and installed wordpress and a holding page. I can't work out how to 301 redirect all the old indexed pages to the home page without the existing wordpress redirect. Anyone care to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RaceMedia0 -
List of Off page techniques
Hello Everyone, Please share the list of off page techniques to improve ranking and which techniques completely avoided?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
Can Anyone show me a site that has followed the seomoz seo rules
Hi i have been reading the seo information on here which is very interesting and i would like to know if anyone can point to any sites that have followed the rules and advice. It is great when you can read the info and rules but i feel it is also better to see a site that has followed the rules and to hear from people who have followed the information and put them into practice and explain what results they have got. I am currently building the following website http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com so it would be great to see a site that has followed all the rules and who can explain if they work or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaireH-1848860