A fellow reader of yours named Gabrielle asked a very good question about the real estate website sold to her by one of the “gurus”. Her question was:

If we bought into one of those websites of the canned version, and we were to attempt to drive traffic to it thru PPC and adwords and keyword strategies, etc., and we spent many hours and days to try to optimize it for the search engines, chances are, the “guru” who sold it to us or one of his partners or first served affiliates has already beat us to the punch with the search engines. That would make our site be deemed as “virtually identical” making all our efforts to have been in vain. Is this correct?

The answer?

Unfortunately for you, its mostly correct that your search engine related efforts have been in vain when using one of the “boilerplate” real estate websites from the real estate gurus. There are generally two different ways that these real estate gurus have sold their websites:

  1. UNIQUE DOMAIN: They’ll give you a unique domain name (such as SampleHouseSite.com), but the content on that page is exactly identical to every other domain sold by the guru
  2. AFFILIATE LINK: They’ll give you an “affiliate” link within the guru’s website (such as GuruDomain.com/YourNameHere). In this case, every web page sold by the guru is the same (including the domain name), with the only difference from one customer to the next being the “YourNameHere” portion of the website address.

Both of these approaches have a huge problem as far as getting listed in Google, the major search engine of our time. And the problem involves both the “free” search results and the “pay per click” search results they produce through Google Adwords.

Challenges Associated With “Free” Search Results: If the content of your web page is identical to the content of another web page, with the only difference being the web address (URL) used to find the website, chances are your website will never receive any free traffic from Google. This is because Google specifically watches for what’s called “Duplicate Content” which is identical content published on more than one page. When they find duplicate content, their response is generally to allow the first website that they found with the duplicate content to remain in the search engines, while not listing (or giving a very low rank) to the duplicate pages.

The Bottom Line For Getting Free Search Engine Traffic From Google To A “Guru’s” Real Estate Website: If the real estate website your guru sold to you was already ranked in Google at the time you bought your copy of the real estate website, you won’t likely receive any free traffic from Google’s search engine, regardless of how “optimized” your guru says your website is, and regardless of whether your website is on a unique domain or not. The only viable solution is to have a unique website on a unique domain name.

In my next post, I’ll address the issues associated with using “Pay Per Click” advertising to get traffic to a “guru” real estate website. Unfortunately, it’s not much better. But there is a good solution, so stay tuned for when I update you about the next part of this post.

Thanks for reading FreeRealEstateTraining.com!