I love when I stumble across something that completely changes my perspective on things. Its even better, when this perspective starts to go against some traditional thought processes. This time, it is web traffic - or where people are coming from to your site/listing.
My REALTOR (yes my place is on the market) sent me some weekly stats of traffic to the listing page. I looked at it and had a semi eye opening observation. Most of the traffic came from Craigslist! How awesome is that? I still don’t think people realize how simple it is to really get major exposure. I keep reading about ‘gaming the search engines’, optimizing pages for placement, the big debate about Trulia and its linking practices, or one of the many other ‘best practices’. All of which to me seem like you are trying to outsmart the search engines. But look how simple and effective just getting yourself in front of some targeted eye balls really is.
To me, I still believe, if you provide something that has true intrinsic value, it’ll rise to the top. When you build things for search engines, and not people, you create limited value to those people that you attracted. It’d be like attracting bees with a fake smell of honey. Eventually, they figure out the game and not care. Real honey, with real value - will get them everytime.
Chris, with all due respect, but that is not the issue. If the listing for your place were syndicated to Trulia, and I’m assuming that it’s not, because I don’t see them as a referrer on your Obeo stats, chances are that Trulia rather than Craigslist would have been the top referrer to your virtual tour. To my limited knowledge, no one has doubted that Trulia is a big traffic provider. However, that doesn’t excuse their sleazy practice of tagging the listing’s source of origin with a “nofollow” label. And by now, it’s no longer a “oops, it was an oversight on our part”, since this discussion has been going on for several weeks now in the RE.net, and Trulia is aware of it. This is deliberately schemed by Trulia’s management and executed by their SEO guys/gals.