In part 1 of “Why The Real Estate Website Your Guru Sold You Is Disliked By Google“, I exposed to you why it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to get significant, if any, free listings at all on Google for the website your real estate guru sold to you.

And that’s bad, because Google is the king of the hill when it comes to free (aka “organic”) search traffic.

But that’s not the whole story. You’ve probably noticed that when you run a search at Google, there are search results in colored boxes on the right side of the search results page. These are paid advertisements, also known as “Pay Per Click” ads. And Google drives a HUGE amount of traffic through their Pay Per Click system.

The simple way to understand a pay per click ad is this: If a person wants their website to be listed on Google for a particular search term, that person can pay Google to put up a listing for their website whenever that term is entered in Google. And each time that ad is clicked, the advertiser has to pay Google.

Google’s pay per click program is called AdWords, and the AdWords program is how Google makes the bulk of their income.

Adwords would seem to solve the problem for those of you who have a “real estate guru” website. You won’t be able to get your website listed in the free results, but at least you could just buy some ads from Google and the problem is solved, right?

Not so fast.

Google implemented a policy a couple of years ago regarding the advertising of “Affiliate Programs” using AdWords. To Google, an “affiliate program” is basically any circumstance in which traffic from multiple advertisers is being directed to the same domain name. And that’s a no-no. The rules are more exact than this, but fundamentally Google will only allow one domain name to be advertised per keyword.

This is a huge negative for those of you who have a subdirectory of your real estate guru’s website as your only URL. For example, if the link to your specific website address is something like “GuruDomain.com/YourNameHere”, you may have a problem. Because if both you and some other person who uses your real estate guru’s website both try to get listed for the term “we buy houses” through AdWords, at least one of you will probably be refused (though maybe not immediately – you might get away with it for a few days before Google sees it).

The only real hope you have (if you insist on using your real estate guru’s web pages) is that you select keywords in which there’s no interest from other people using the same service.

The news isn’t a whole lot better if you’ve been issued a unique domain name for a website that is otherwise identical to every other website issued by your real estate guru. The rules are less clear here, but generally speaking Google does all they can to avoid duplicate content, even when that content is hosted on different domain names. So if you have a website called “BobBuysHouses” that you bought from Guru “X” and someone else bought the same website and theirs is called “TinaBuysHouses” but is otherwise identical, it’s likely that Google will not show both of your ads for the same keyword phrase.

The fundamental solution to all of this is to have a truly unique website. But how do you have a truly unique website if you already have a job and a full life? It’s easier than you think, and I’ll tell you about it in an upcoming post.

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