Bing now powers Yahoo’s search…for real.

Once the Bing / Yahoo deal was announced in Joly 2009, the questions were immediately raised…”When would Bing finally start powering Yahoo’s search?” and “What tools of Yahoo’s (such as Yahoo site explorer,etc.) would be still available” or would they scrap them.

Finally, after much research (and messing around) by Bing and Yahoo… these questions have been put to rest…for the most part. (Hat tip to Read Write Web for their article.) Take a moment to read their article.

So we now know that BingHoo has (in effect) a 28% market share of search. And we know that as of today that became unified with Bing powering it. Great. This actually makes it easier to optimize because we are now shooting at two targets rather than three.

We also know that Yahoo Site Explorer will stick around. Splendid. Saves many of us quite a bit of script writing and etc. Good on them.

The real questions for our clients have been…how do we take advantage of this? How can we build our web presence in a way that maximized traffic from BOTH?

Bing seems to reward keyword rich domain names, along with more of the old school on page stuff. (Title tags, etc). That said, Google as well has bent their algorithm in that direction and we are seeing many of the old keyword rich (err…stuffed) domain names do well with them.

(a little tidbit) In Google, my-keyword-stuffed-domain.com does not appear to do near as well as mykeywordstuffeddomain.com in our testing..I am just sayin…

Also Google still seems to have a VASTLY superior methodology for determining the authority of inbound links and to have a far more well tuned approach towards evaluating the authority that comes from them. While that is no surprise, given that was / is what Google was founded on…BingHoo has been surprisingly slow in improving that side of their search engine.

We are preparing some new ideas and techniques for our clients and will be sending them out shortly. In a world of change,the one thing certain is that each change brings opportunity to grow business, to add revenue and to build a more dominant web presence.

Why I am stoked to go to Nanaimo…

It is now less than a month away…and I am ready to go.

The Real Estate Webmasters Summit is my favorite event of the year. Have I been to PubCon? Yes. Search engine conferences. Yep. They are all good and I learn stuff and rub shoulders with people and get to compare notes and network. All of that is worthwhile.

But for my time, the best conference is the one where literally ALL of the folks that are there are rabidly focused on one thing. Getting their sites to the top PROFITABLY. These are a small group of REALTORS who want nothing but the best. This is my third year being there and getting a chance to spend a couple of days with them.

This year holds special significance for me since today is the one year anniversary of a serious surgery followed by what has been a long recovery. I am fine and back to doing what I love with a 100% clean bill of health, but going back to visit Morgan and the REW crew has been a pretty good carrot during the process.

This year is ALSO cool in the sense that I will be bringing my son Craig with me. He is the second oldest of my four kids and he worked on several projects with me with the reward being a trip to Nanaimo BC.

One final thing that excites me about the REW Summit this year is that there will be a lot of new faces there. These are people who are ready to make an impact in the real estate marketplace by building and owning their real estate online marketing assets. They as a rule are entrepreneurial, friendly, kind and hard working.

I for one, cannot think of a better place to spend a couple of days…Morgan, get ready my friend. I am bringing my “A” game . Thanks again for the invitation.

A backlog of information and posts…

I have been literally crushed with the amount of work going on lately.

More stuff has been going on around here than ever before and due to that and my participation in a contest to help a REALTOR started by my friends at Real Estate Webmasters, there are a number of posts that are going to be posted in the coming days.

Some are current observations that I wanted to post but did not have time. Some are as well the results of testing that we have been doing here at EoS that simply finally got finished. So without further ado, stay tuned to the coming posts and we should have some fun….

Syndication – How real estate is different.

I was having a conversation with a Real Estate agent who asked why I have steadfastly been against the idea of syndication , until there was no other choice in the real estate industry (which is where our brokerage is at currently). This same person was quizzing me as to why I do NOT recommend writing “FRESH” content every day 643,466 times a day on my blog.

I thought for a long time about how to explain this and since I did a pretty crappy job of convincing them in our conversation…let me try again here.

It’s ALL about Quality vs Quantity.

Syndication in MOST media is a good thing…even a GREAT thing. Why? Because a “syndicated” talk show host or a “syndicated” columnist gets their name in front of EVERY Tom, Dick and Harry in more cities each time they are syndicated. Each additional radio station adds MORE exposure and takes away a potential competitor.

Unlike a radio talk show host (who does not OWN a radio station in every town – thus each new town = a bigger microphone), websites are global in nature and one website CAN be the dominant voice for real estate in your city worldwide.

Does Syndicating Real Estate listings do that? No. HECK No, 1000 times NO. Why? Because you are not syndicating yourself. You are syndicating the listing. In essence you are handing what once was YOUR bait to other fishermen and having them fish in what used to be your pond. Does that sound like BUILDING your marketing capabilities? Didn’t think so.

All you are doing is building the competition’s ability to compete with you.

The argument from some is that syndication “differentiates” you from the competition. Once everyone syndicates, there is ZERO differentiation and the only one who wins are other fishermen who you gave the bait to and invited them to fish in YOUR fishing hole.

Need a graphic to explain this? It looks like this:

Graphic Credit

The bottom line is that we are now at a point where EVERYONE is syndicating. Noone is getting differentiation and (at least in Louisville, although not true in some other cities) the syndicators are not generating much buyer traffic at all and their main concern is how much of the REALTOR advertising dollar they are receiving.

A final thought. Zillow traffic: 10 million visitors per month Ummm..OK… Accepting that at face value 10 million visitors / 5 million listings = 2 visitors PER MONTH PER LISTING on average – and you have to take out the number of visitors that visit their site looking for Joe Blow Celebrity’s new home for sale AND you also need to subtract a large percentage for persons looking for home values, as well as sellers looking at their own listing… – so its not even generating near that much on average.

I can think of many other advertising venues that generate greater exposure and have a significantly better long term ROI (because NOTHING is free forever ).

So are we syndicating? Yes. Competitively we now must (and we will.) Do I think it is good for the industry. No. Never have.