Ron Wilczek, who markets Phoenix homes for sale was kind enough to pose a couple questions to be answered on this blog.  If you have a real estate marketing question, and you want a nice incoming link to your website, ask your question today; you can also remain anonymous if you’d like.  It’s a win-win situation because answering a question means that I don’t need to come up with a topic for a new post!

Is Buying Links a Good Idea?

It’s true that establishing incoming links to your real estate website is an important part of SEO.  The search engines consider quality incoming links, with good anchor text, to be a “vote” for your website.

But, you may have also heard that there is a problem with buying links.  And, in some situations, that’s true.

From my perspective, the only kind of paid link that will give you a good incoming link to your site come from online directories.  There are many online real estate directories where you can advertise your business by paying a fee for a listing in the directory.  And, there are many directories that will let the search engines follow that link to your website.

If a directory marks all their links as “nofollow” links, that means that the search engines will not follow the link and your website won’t get a “vote”.  It may still be a good idea to get listed, but only if paying for that listing results in increased traffic to your website.

The situation that the search engines frown upon is one in which you are paying for a link for the sole purpose of getting additional search engine votes.  For example, if you pay for a link on a website that isn’t clearly related to the topic of your website, you could get into trouble with the search engines.  Or, if you purchase a link from a site that is known for selling links, that’s not good either.  But, don’t ask me how the search engines can tell when a site is known for selling links; they just do.

Is Masking Domain Names a Good Idea?

In short, no.  Normally, you’d mask a domain name when you are forwarding a domain name to a website.  It’s not a good idea for two reasons:  forwarding a domain name isn’t a good idea to begin with, and masking the domain name just compounds the problem.

If you have more than one domain name pointing to your website, here’s how the names should be set up:

• Default Domain Name – ideally, the default domain name is the one that is the oldest because search engines put a fair amount of emphasis on the age of a domain name when ranking websites.  In addition, you’d use the default domain name in your SEO efforts.
• Secondary Domain Names – First, keep in mind that the search engines don’t like having lots of domain names pointing to one website.  They don’t tell us what they consider to be “lots”, so my advice is always to err on the side of using the fewest number feasible.  Any secondary domain name should be redirected to the website using a 301 redirect.

When you establish a 301 redirect, that tells the search engines that the redirect is permanent.  The search engines then won’t pay attention to the secondary names.  With a 301 redirect, when a person lands on your website, the name on the address bar in their browser shows the default domain name.

For example, the default domain name for our Point2 Agent website is BuildRealEstateWebsites.com.  There’s also a shorter name redirected to the site with a 301 redirect:  ByGIWI.com. 

If you type ByGIWI.com into the address bar of your browser, you’ll land on our Point2 site.  Once there, your browser’s address bar will show BuildRealEstateWebsites.com, because that is the default name.

If I had directed ByGIWI.com to the site with a 302 redirect and masking, I’d have a problem with the search engines.  A 302 redirect tells the search engines that the name is temporarily pointed to the site.  So, the search engines will actually see two domain names with what seems like completely duplicate content.  That’s bad.

In addition, the masking will ensure that only the redirected domain name appears in the address bar.  So, if I had set up the domains that way, every page on the site would be identified as ByGIWI.com.  That’s usually confusing to visitors and search engines alike.

I hope this is more clear than it seems to me in reading it over.

So, the moral of the story is this:  If your oldest domain name is the one you like least, don’t go to extraordinary lengths to cover it up.  It’s true that visitors will see the original and default domain name when they land on the site, but that will probably be a small price to pay in order to get the ranking your aged domain name will provide!