Real Estate Agent and Brokerage Blogs

OK. So, on the Internet there are a seed set of sites that have Google, MSN, Ask and Yahoos ultimate trust. This might be where an engine would begin it’s crawl on the Internet, working outwards from the seed set to the rest of the Internet.  While I cannot tell you what these sites are, you might be able to assume that sites like the Dmoz, government sites, respected educational institutions, Wikipedia, etc could be among this seed set of sites. The number of these sites out there is probably very low in the low hundreds, but one single link from one of these sites or a link from a site that is less than 3 links away from one of these trusted sites can boost your real estate blog into an implied trust with Google and greatly improve your search engine positions.

What is Trust Distance or Trust Rank?

Of course, I gotta link out to SEOmoz for the definitive explanation:

Whiteboard Friday-Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link Building from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Resource: Whiteboard Friday-Using Trust Rank to Guide Your Link Building

TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in a paper by Yahoo! researchers for semi-automatically separating useful webpages from spam. Many Web spam pages are created only with the intention of misleading search engines. These pages, chiefly created for commercial reasons, use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings on the search engines result pages. While human experts can easily identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Yahoos TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages. TrustRanks reliability diminishes as documents become further removed from the seed set.

Resource: Has TrustRank Arrived? » Make Money Online at Cash Quests

Trust Distance is your real estate blogs distance from a trusted site. The closer your real estate blog is linked to from on of those sites, the more authority you have with th search engines.

What the Internet Made Of:

• A few hundred seed Trusted Sites that are vital
• Some Stuff that is good
• Some Stuff that is OK
• Mostly (50%) stuff that is spam

How trust is distributed to websites over the Internet

Tier I, Trusted Seed Sites

Trusted Sites: There are a few very trusted domains out there.

Example: DOJ.gov, LLI.org

When these sites link out to other sites they link to:

• 100% quality sites
• 0% spam sites

These sites are called Tier II sites or -1 Trust Disatnce

Tier II, -1 Trust sites, 1 link away from a Trust Site

Example: Wall Street Journal, Harvard.edu

When these sites link out to other sites they link to:

• 95% quality sites
• .1% spam sites

These sites are called Tier III sites or -2 Trust Disatnce

Tier III, -2 Trust sites, 2 links away from a Trust Site

Example:

When these sites link out to other sites they link to:

• 70% quality sites
• 10% spam sites

As you extrapolate that out to -3, -4 Trust Distance, you will see more and more spam sites being linked to and thus the value of the site loses credibility and Trust.

Resource: Trust Rank Algorithm

How you can use TrustRank sites to avoid the Sandbox and Boost Search Engine Position for your Real Estate Blog?

You can pretty well guess what some of these Trusted Sites are. For example, you can guess that Librarians Internet Index, DMOZ, Government sites, Large Newspapers or New Outlets might be within the trusted circle, so if you can get a link directly from one of these sources to your real estate blog you will be golden. Now, if that seems a little daunting, here are some ideas:

1. You can probably get listed in Dmoz simply by finding the right category, seeing how other sites in that category write their descriptions and then submitting to the directory. It can take soe time to get accepted as it is a human edited directory, but it is worth it.

2. You can focus on writing a high quality nationally focused piece on something controversial like your views on the NAR, how the current market is good for good Realtors by culling bad Realtors, or general market analysis. Then, find the journalist at various main stream media outlets responsible for writing in your section and seed your post to them, or call them up and see if they might not also be interested in covering the story.

3. You can make the first page of Digg. Digg is probably a Trust -1 or Trust -2 site, so making the first page of Digg s beneficial froma traffic, backlink and trust standpoint. The way you make Digg is writing a high quality national piece. You might want to focus on something sensational in your area rather than on real estate, then see the story out to everyone you know asking for the Diggs. If you can get about 200 in a day, you stand a chance of making th first page.

4. You can research sites that have links from TrustRank sites. By using the link:domain query in Google you can determine which sites might have direct links from TrustRank sites and then target these Trust -1 sites for a link.

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