A post from SEOmoz, along with recent discussions across the Enterprise Network regarding placement for property address searches, has sparked our interest in reevaluating current tactics for long tail search terms. We’d also like to discuss how to sustain a high volume of traffic despite the inherent complications caused by using IDX data.  A concept not officially supported by Google but understood by the search engine optimization community is an “indexation cap,” meaning a single domain will only be capable of maintaining a certain number of pages. Once that limit is reached, nothing more will be retained (unless pages are dropped).

First, we’ll talk about the indexation cap and the technical factors that influence this number and then move on to the practices you can apply that will get you past these complications.

Factors to Consider

Importance of Domain-Level PR: Domain PageRank (PR) value is likely to be a major factor in the indexation cap, but not necessarily in the ranking for a particular keyword (low PR domains will often outrank higher PR domains).

PR can be thought of as a “trustworthiness” or authority factor and the value passed from links is weighed against this “trust index.” The following is an example of this effect where the f(x) notation simply indicates that the amount of PR being passed is a function of Page A’s PR, x. The value passed to B and C (assuming these are the only two links on the page) is divided evenly between the two. If ten links exist on A, the value is divided by ten, ect.

Backlink Profile of the Domain: Backlink profiles include the count of unique domains linking to your site and why each link exists (evaluating relevance and applying it to the value of a link). The more domains linking back to you, the better.

Rate of Link Growth: Don’t build links too quickly. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz recommends you “be a snail at the beginning of an SEO campaign” and we completely agree. Spikes in external link building and unnatural link growth patterns can kill ranking and create a campaign much more challenging than it should be (in other words, it’s counterproductive).

Links will build naturally as new articles and content are added. Actively finding twenty new links per day for a week then dropping this completely will raise flags in the engine.

Depth & Frequency of Linking to Pages on the Domain: Not all links should go to the homepage. Finding a location for the deep links that are relevant to the linking articles and the anchor text is an important factor. If the search engines see that there are only a handful of pages that receive links from external sources and the bulk of the deeper pages are not (or seldomly) linked to, this can indicate that users only find a small fraction of the site useful and will result in a lower number of pages added to the index. The moral of the story is to keep links coming in to all the deeper pages that normally get ignored; this will indicate there is some value to the user and the page should remain in the index.

Content Uniqueness: We’re starting to sound like a broken record, but the importance of this factor in all areas of optimization cannot be ignored. If content is not unique, there is little value to the engines and it will likely be dropped and attributed to the original owner (or what the engine perceives as the original owner).

Later in this article, we’ll cover how you can test for uniqueness in your content.

Visitor, CTR and Usage Data Metrics: Being brokers of information, engines will use the data they gather on user behavior to gain a competitive edge regarding what users believe to be most interesting/important/relevant. Careful examination of Google Analytics data by Google can reveal situations where users find a result for their query that seems relevant and visit the site, then immediately (or within ten seconds) hit the back button and find another site. This user behavior, if proven to be a trend, will be used by an engine to flag a page for lack of relevance to the given query. Too many instances of this happening on a site can be used as a factor to drop the number of indexed pages. There is a lot of controversy regarding the topic of engines using analytics data to make decisions on engine placement and indexed page count, but it’s safe to say that any data that belongs to them will be used by them to improve their system.

Search Quality Rater Analysis + Manual Spam Reports: There is a team at every search engine company that will manually evaluate sites for relevance. The role of this team is to find spam sites and those using black-hat search engine optimization tactics and remove them from the index. If a member of this team believes your site to be manipulating search results unfairly, this generally results in not only a drop in indexed pages, but a complete ban from the engine. A copy of the handbook for this team at Google is available at SearchEngineLand.com for anyone interested in seeing how this is done.

IDX and Duplicate Content: A vast majority of the information about a property present in an Enterprise Network site (and any real estate site) comes from an IDX feed. The information is shared with hundreds of other sites, including the competition. The nature of sharing information in this manner automatically puts all parties involved into a duplicate content violation sinkhole. Content ownership can only apply to one site and one page.

As with The Highlander, “There can be only one!”

The Goal of the Engine: To understand the duplicate content violation, we have to understand the primary mission of the search engine: provide the most relevant and most complete understanding of the requested phrase. To have a search result page full of the same snippet of information ten times over would go against this purpose, so the duplicate content violation system has been put in place. This doesn’t mean a search engine is going to punish you for having the same content in multiple locations (or copying someone else’s information), but it does mean the value of the unique signature for that particular article will be attributed to one site which may not be yours. As a result, that unique article will be indexed as belonging to someone else and your site simply won’t be listed for that content nor receive any of the benefits of having that content associated with your site.

How to Test for Uniqueness: There are several advanced operators available in Google for filtering very specific information. The most common is the use of quotes (“) around a phrase to indicate that we are looking for the exact match of the provided phrase, not the non-sequential occurrence of each of those words within a document. To find if a document is unique or not, we’ll want to pull three sets of around seven words and run them through Google with quotes. The reason we want to test multiple parts of a document in this manner is because a small phrase may very well be indexed in multiple pages (it wouldn’t be fair to only list one page that references and displays segments of the Declaration of Independence, as there may be several perspectives). By testing three sets, we’re able to find if the document has the capacity to hold a unique signature within the search engines.

For this example, we’ll be using this document which has not yet been released, so there should be no occurrence of it anywhere in Google (and there isn’t):

The Solution

Unique Content: Unique content is the single most important thing you can do to promote your site on the engines under any strategy. Make your content relevant to your targeted keywords (and include the keywords a couple times) but keep it user-friendly, readable and even enjoyable. Copying someone else’s content (even with mild rewording) can land you in a lot of trouble. If you can’t write the content yourself, find someone who can. There is no substitute for unique content and the engines work very hard to maintain this.

As it applies to the long tail terms we’re focusing on for this guide, be sure the content being listed in the property description (either on the main site or the IPW) is unique to your site (and don’t give this revised, unique content to the MLS board, it’s just for your site). While everyone else fights for a decent position using the IDX content, you’ll have something unique and relevant to the property. If nothing else, this will help the property details page be recognized as unique in the search engines.

Blogging: Beyond the content on your site, write about the properties on a blog and link that back to the property details page (use the property address as the link text; this is the long tail term we’re after). We want this content to be unique as well. Copying from the main site or IDX feed will do more harm than good.

Doing this will not only pass authority and trust to the main site on a deep page, but it will guarantee this property details page is visible to the search spiders (not all properties will be seen and indexed, GoogleBot is too busy to scan the entire site every day and it will “lose interest” after so many pages).

Establishing Links: As with links from your blog, creating links externally will pass trust and authority. Additionally, more domains linking back will pass more authority and will offer more paths for a search spider to enter the site. Consider adding relevant comments to other blogs with your link in the comment or join a few forums and add your IPWs, rebrand or the brokerage site to your posts and your signature line.

In short, any place you can place that link and it’s a related page or site, go for it.