The Perils Of Some Real Estate Gurus Masquerading As Web Designers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Real estate agents like to buy the newest best thing. If I were a real estate agent and wanted to build a website, I would stay as far away from real estate gurus who claim to have the best method for building a real estate website. For one thing, if they’re worth their weight in salt as a real estate agent they probably don’t know squat about designing or building websites, let alone search engine optimization. It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in; to succeed online today you need to have a firm grasp on search engine optimization and how to rank your site well at the search engines.

I visited one real estate website and noticed at the bottom that there was a copyright notice showing the owner of the content was the person who had developed the website, not the real estate agent whose site I was on. That’s a big no-no. If you pay a web designer or another professional to build you a website, make sure that you are buying the content. You don’t want to pay someone to build you a website only to find out that they own the content. You won’t be able to modify it and what good does it do to have a website that you don’t own the content to?

The Other Mistake: PLR Is Duplicate Content

That was the first mistake this real estate agent made. Upon further investigation, I found out that the owner of all of that content also licensed the rights for other real estate agents around the country to use it as well. The company actually had links to their customers’ websites. They all looked exactly the same! It was one template and all of the website contained content that was exactly the same. They were PLR articles. It looks like real estate agents who bought into that plan paid for a template with duplicate content so none of them got any SEO benefit out of their websites at all.

When you go to build your real estate website, be sure you don’t buy a package that looks just like everybody else’s. More importantly, make sure the content is not the same as anyone else’s online. If even one other web page has the same content that you have and that web page got that content first then your web page won’t rank in the search engines. It’s duplicate content. You’re only killing your business. Why would you do that?