In the real estate marketing arena, there are many sites popping up at the top of the search engine rankings for highly competitive local real estate keywords. These websites are not local real estate agents trying to help you buy or sell a home, but rather national corporations trying to drive traffic to their site by tricking real estate agents into linking to them in the way of widgets. A widget is a small block of code inserted on a webpage that produces a graphical user interface with a small block containing pictures, text, and LINKS!
Trulia (.com) is, by far, the trickiest of the tricksters. They are currently enticing naive real estate agents to place their widgets on their "Anywhere USA" real estate site. The widget is customizable to fit in with the style of your site and contains images of homes for sale, market stats, maps, etc. within your local market. Here's the slimy part; each widget contains anchor text with highly competitive keyword phrases. For example, I'm a real estate broker in Austin, Texas and the Trulia widgets on local Realtor sites contain anchor text including "Austin Real Estate" and Austin Homes for Sale." What these SEO rookie agents do not know is that every time they place a Trulia widget on their local site, they are telling Google that Trulia is the source for real estate in their area.
Here in Austin, Trulia shows up on page one of Google for both Austin Real Estate and Austin Homes for Sale. The site offers nationally syndicated MLS listings for just about every city in the country, much the same way as Realtor.com. Just about every halfway descent Realtor site has the same local MLS listings. The difference is that the local Realtor knows the market, Trulia knows nothing. The thing that irks me is that Trulia offers no real value. They offer no local content, information, or advice. They do have a section titled "Trulia Voices" which visitors can ask questions to real estate professionals. And who answers the questions, you ask? Well it's the local real estate agent! Reading through the Trulia Voices section is hilarious. You will see questions asked by potential homebuyers such as, "How's the real estate market in Austin, Texas? I'll thinking about relocating." To which a dozen or so Realtors will answer, "Good, call me for top quality representation", or "The market is awesome, call me today and we'll start searching for your dream home." The point being, if you ask questions as a potential home buyer on Trulia, you will be bombarded with solicitations. Where's the value there? As a buyer, you might as well sign up for Homegain (the real estate bastard child - article coming soon).
If you are a Realtor thinking about adding any Trulia product on the real estate site you have worked so hard to develop, please reconsider. Your goal should be to rank high in the search engines. A mediocre real estate site with no graphics that ranks high will always be more profitable than a flashy site that no one will ever find. Placing a link on your site pointing to Trulia with the very anchor text you wish to rank for is absolute suicide.
If you currently have Trulia widgets (links) on your site, email them and ask that they return the favor by linking back to you (without a nofollow attribute). It will NEVER happen!
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