The recent Google "Florida update" devastated the search engine position of many Web sites. Right after that, I began getting calls from agents who had been tracking the positions of 6/10 and higher Google PageRanked Realtor® sites both before and after the "Florida update".

The agents had noticed that the 6/10 web site belonging to my wife, Debbie Ferrari, did not get hurt by the Google "Florida Update," and they asked me to help them make their sites supposedly "bulletproof" like Debbie's apparently was.

Well, since most people seldom follow through and do what consultants advise them to do anyway, I thought that I could go ahead and tell the tale here of how I developed Debbie's site. I'm not sure if knowing what we did will help agents, but for sure, her site did maintain its number one position in our county of three million souls for many key word phrases, including the best ones: "orange county real estate" and "orange county MLS." Here goes:

Way back in 1996, when Debbie and I first noticed that other sites had pages with outgoing links on them, it just made sense to become as many of those "outgoing links" as we could. After all, people find web sites mostly in two ways: by using search engines and by clicking on prominent links. We spent weeks looking for sites where we could "Add URL," and back then, no one cared if you reciprocated or not.

Remember, those were the days of "portals," and "vortals," and "communities" that sported links to almost every kind of business in the world. Millions of people visited those sites to "find out where to go" and soon Debbie began to get many visitors from such sites. Excite, Infoseek, Starting Point, Webcrawler and Angelfire, were the big general-category portals then. IRED, Homeseekers, HomeScout, Realtor.com and RealtyTimes were the biggie vortals for the real estate industry WAY back in 1996, 1997.

Gradually, bigger firms absorbed such "umbrella" sites (remember Microsoft's ill-fated "Sidewalk" portal?), but many of those thousands of early links to Debbie's site stayed where they were. Also, big sites like Angelfire (now part of Lycos) and thousands of others would let you make yourself a "web presence" page for free. At one time, Debbie had 24 separate web pages, most of them free. All of them "findable" by search engines. This gave her great presence at an early time on the web—in 1997-- long before Google became famous with concepts like PageRank.

PageRank and "popularity" worked well for sites like Debbie's because we already had so many links out there (most all, unreciprocated) pointing to her site. When Google came along, these links, considered "votes for a site's popularity/value" by Google, made her site rank high right from the start. The first time I ever checked her rank on the Google toolbar a little over a year ago, she was already a 5/10; now she is a 6/10.

But I feel that the real element that makes Deb's site well favored by Google is all the helpful content that we added throughout the past seven years, much of which happens to be either text-imbedded, or straight lists of OUTBOUND links, to many huge, but relevant realty and home-related resource sites.

In other words, before Google even came along we had built a web site just the way they used to say to build it...a site just stuffed with tools and info. One loaded with data and links so abundant that virtually any visitor to Debbie's site could find out what they needed either within her site or elsewhere on the Web within a couple of clicks at the most. When we began, we got advice from one Internet guru who suggested that we "empathize with, educate, and empower each and every visitor."

Well, we did that, but it meant a whole lotta work, especially when you are building a custom site from scratch. We found excellent help along the way from some early masters at design, though we dictated the content, layout, positioning on pages, links, etc. and still do. Today, Advanced Access hosts Debbie's site and we can only say that we love them all to pieces for the brilliant contributions that they make! However, the challenge is that we are still competing with large vortals and portals to get in the top five positions.

After the recent Google Florida Update, Debbie's site had dropped from #1 on Google for "Orange County real estate" to #2, just behind Househunt.com, a national directory that is also a real estate "vortal" (a "vertical portal," hence, a "vortal"). Such sites actually do have data on almost every city in the country, but only enough to give a nutshell version that is almost useless to a visitor.

As an example of how a national commercial site like this one sort of "tricks" Google, see what househunt.com says about the Orange County, CA city of Dana Point.

Now, compare that to what Debbie's site says about Dana Point.

Note all the incredibly valuable links that a visitor can access on the bottom of Debbie's page. Note the lack of such information and links on the househunt page. Which page helps the visitor more?

Yet, for about a week, Google had househunt.com ranked #1 and Debbie's site ranked #2. So Debbie and I can empathize with so many Realtors whose highly ranked sites got replaced by some real estate vortal, or worse yet, some general info portal that is merely a "fiction" of a really valuable site.

Happily, the Google positions reversed themselves and Debbie's site went back to #1.

We do sympathize with agents and webmasters out there who, during the past 30 days, saw their sites sink outa sight on Google. But it takes more than reciprocal links to make a site come up high on Google. It also takes valuable content. And I think that there's the rub---too many agents thought that reciprocal links alone would keep them ranked high on Google and other engines serviced by Google.

I suspect that Google can now pretty well tell the difference between what is placed on a site solely to appease Google, and what is there for the benefit and use of a consumer who is searching for certain valid key word content. We never tried to optimize Debbie's site with cloaking, doorway pages, meta tag chicanery, or other tactics (except for one fairly innocuous one, which will remain secret), mostly because we don't have much use for such sophisticated things. All we did was continually add new pages and more links that we felt home buyers and sellers, new or seasoned ones, would find useful to have all in one place.

Now and then we hear the theories that once you attain a PageRank of 6 or 7, many of the filters that Google uses drop away for you, unless your site is way, way over-optimized. Who knows? Since Debbie's site is a 6/10-ranked site now, that comes up #1 for about 15 key phrases in her area, it appears to be true. We're not making any radical changes. I'm told that making just one big web site mistake can knock you out of the running.

We have seen Deb's site move up and down before on Google, but mostly stay at the top. When it temporarily fell out of first place recently, as in the past, we never panicked and never tinkered with the site as I hear many agents have recently done. We just knew that the site had more content than did those of Deb's peers and so we waited it out. We subscribe to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The cream rises to the top, and all that.

I have absolutely no evidence for this next belief, which is entirely mine, but I would not be surprised if Google, logical as it is, might even give higher page rank to sites that have ENDURED.

Any business that has stayed on the web continuously since 1996 or 1997 has to be considered a force to reckon with and has to have offered people something worthwhile. Most businesses on the web in that early time have long departed; most other sites are relative newcomers, especially in the real estate industry, which many people regard as "Johnny come lately" Internet-wise. It would not surprise me to find that, all other things being equal, Google rated older sites slightly higher over younger ones.

Let's hope that the repositioning of my wife's site to the number one spot, means that Google has refined itself backwards a bit, to once again favor local homegrown Realtor sites over the big national ones that try to bulldoze their way upwards on the engines.

One thing is known for sure about Google---it is always going to change in order to combat those who figure out ways to fool it. So beware. Emphasize content over reciprocal links. Because Google is one really, really smart search engine!

Published: December 31, 2003

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .