Getting ready for Google Base!

5 minute read

Without a doubt Google will soon be launching Google Base in Australia, a FREE classifieds site that will hurt sites like Ebay/Trading Post and many other classifieds websites that many of Australia largest companies have invested heavily in.

Google Base is NOT what I have been talking about in relation to Google launching a real estate portal world-wide, but it is a good start to get your listings on a global website.

So what do you need to do to make sure your agency is ready? In short standards based websites with a good database like the free and powerful MySQL and PostgreSQL databases are the easiest to configure. You can send feeds of data on a daily basis to Google Base as long as it does to exceed the daily quota (which only large portals would do). The second thing you will need to do is to define how your property data is defined.

A great start would be making sure your website is Google Sitemaps compliant. This basically is a new standard that Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines use to index your websites, it defines by XML every single page of your site and ensures that all of those pages are indexed in the search engines. If your website is sitemaps compliant the Google Sitemaps software will let you know of all of the errors of your site.

As an example this websites Google Sitemaps compliant page is http://business2.com.au/sitemap.xml and this is a document that describes all of the pages of this site. Google, Yahoo and MSN have search engine robots that crawl each and every page and index these results in their respective search engines, so if you have 200 property listings and another 40 pages of data on your site you would more than likely have 240 page links in this document.

If you do not know if your website is compliant, then it isn’t- this is because most web developers do not care to go to these lengths, but don’t be worried, if your site is developed correctly it should only take a day or so at most for your developer to get it set-up.

If you have predominantly flash website it may take a few days longer (maybe a week) and if you have a framed based website (like many REA/Just Listed/ or Domain have developed over the years, then forget it – it is impossible to do because the data is not yours as all pages just link to their websites.

What Now?
Google Base already has a specification for identifying data that you send to them. You can set it up just like you do when you send (if you send) data to Realestate.com.au. If you are a franchise ask your franchise technology arm if they are going to support this and ask them when it will be ready (more than likely they will just say yes to shut you up). The best way to do it is to automatically feed property data, so you do not have yet another website update your property data on.

Send this primer to your developers and get it ready. http://code.google.com/apis/base/starting-out.html

Why Not?
Google Base will not differentiate between a private seller and an agency, they do not care who the data comes from as long as it is legitimate and formatted correctly. Now if you do not want to be associated with a site that supports private advertising then this is not for you. But you could also say the same for Domain.com.au and as the market grows do not think REA will not also allow private advertising in the future – if Google launches a stand alone real estate search engine this will also allow private advertising and REA will be forced to open up as it may feel that it is being challenged – then again it may feel it will get more mileage out of promoting the fact that Google Real Estate supports private sellers and REA doesn’t – who knows?

Why?
Simply put – the exercise of getting your website Google Sitemaps compliant is only going to help you anyway, it will also help your web developer better understand the Internet and how it can serve its clients (you) better.

Finally
So, if you are getting your website re-developed then make sure it is 100% Google Sitemaps Compliant 100% – do not even think about not having it compliant as you will pay a heavy search engine price. If your web developer does not know how to do it – then dump them and get someone who does.

Here is another tip – please dump Flash altogether – its time has passed, I am sorry but it is annoying at best. If you must have Flash have only tiny pieces, never, ever, ever, ever, ever have a splash page.

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7 Comments

  • Glenn
    Posted March 25, 2007 at 1:03 am 0Likes

    Something many agents have probably overlooked that they can activate now is adding your agency in the Google Local Business Centre which is integrated inside Google Maps Australia. Check out maps.google.com.au and click on “Business Owners: Add/Edit Your Business”

    You might have to wait until your PIN Code from Google gets sent from the US via snail mail but it will be worth it. Google improves your own website’s ranking based upon the quality of the websites that link to it. What better quality is there than Google itself?
    .
    Google Base is coming and agents should prepare for that. Our network has identififed that and discussed it in the last technology forum so as to be ready when it goes live for Australia.

    Your post seems to suggest that Google Sitemaps is a necessary chore for agents and web admins to use so as to take advantage of Google Base when it arrives in Australia. Google sitemaps is so much more than that. Google sitemaps is part of Google Webmasters Central which collectively is a fantastic bunch of resources.

    Google sitemaps for instance will tell you what links google sees pointing to your site, what words it associates with your site (and if your suburb and the words real estate are not high in that list sack your web site supplier or SEO professional immediatley.)

    Everyone heres about google and what it can do for your business but I dont think many agents actually fully appreciate what a high ranking and high traffic can do for you. We rank very well in Google ( and others too but they are of lesser importance). Everyday Google brings us over 100 unique visitors to our site to view property… They bring more visitors in total but thats how many view property for sale. These visitors create more over 800 property page views every single day on our website. Thats over and above every property view generated through direct traffic to our own homepage, from realestate.com.au, other real estate portals and from our corporate head office portal.

    The important thing to note here I guess is that all of this traffic is 100% free. When you rank well on google, you also rank well on other search engines and collectively all the other search engines produce numbers just short of googles figures.

    We top these figures up with realestate.com.au and our groups head office portal and collectively we do very well out of the internet, for a minimum investment. Effectively our high traffic from google and other search engines allows us to “average down” the individual cost of property queries from the internet.

    Any agent that does not maximise their search engine traffic will always be at the mercy of the portals and will probably only be getting a fraction of the internet traffic they could. I have had a number of portals (mostly city or region based portals) trying to sell me a listing when their total generated traffic is far less than ours. A lot of them cannot understand why I cant justify $90 per month (or whatever they are charging) when they will share their total visitors amongst 300 to 400 other business on their site and the potential traffic increase they could offer would represent maybe an hour or two at our current levels. They normally laugh when i ask if they want to take and ad out on our site…

    Lets assume that your home suburb is called “Suburb”. If your not coming above your opposition and in the top half of the first page for searches on google for “Suburb Real Estate”, “Suburb Property”, “Suburb Homes”, “Suburb Real Estate Agents” then you need to improve the situation. When you consider it will bring similiar traffic to what you are paying $400-$600 a month for, you can understand the importance.

    Cheers

  • Peter Ricci
    Posted March 25, 2007 at 5:00 am 0Likes

    Glenn, as you look through this site I have been saying these things for years now. You stole my thunder as far as Google Maps is concerned. I have also written an article to go up for Google Maps next week! I have all 3 of my businesses on Google Maps Australia and it takes around 10 days for the letter to arrive.

    What a great article and input from you over the past few weeks I have come to realise the great contribution you are making to the site – please keep it up.

  • Glenn
    Posted March 25, 2007 at 11:26 am 0Likes

    That’s very kind of you to say Peter and I appreciate it. Sorry about the thunder steal though as I had no idea you were keeping that little gem for later..

    I have to confess that I have not had a detailed browse around the site other than the threads I have been posting in. Time being the primary restriction at the moment. I am not even fully up to date what your other businesses are outside of this site but I intend to fully check it out next chance I get.

    I came across the site when I was asked by our head office for my opinion on the Myhome release whilst we were discussing other issues. At that time I had not had a chance to fully explore, but got back to them once I did. They then gave me a link to your article on the release and your impressions (which very closely married my own) and I have enjoyed the place ever since.

    Cheers

  • Glenn
    Posted March 25, 2007 at 11:53 am 0Likes

    Wanting better results on Google? Here is my article of choice at the moment to explain what they need to do to get better results. It is written in fairly basic language and is easy to follow.

    http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-07-n13.html

    Not google related but another great site that other readers might find interesting is http://www.ianr.unl.edu/email/encode/

    This makes your email addresses very difficult for spammers to harvest.

    Peter, what about an area we can swap interesting links like this sort of stuff.. or maybe you have something already that I have not found?!

  • Glenn
    Posted March 25, 2007 at 12:09 pm 0Likes

    also.. just noticed on the official Google Blog that Google is now combining information in its Local Business Centre with its search engine through its new Plus Box feature. They slowly rolling this out at the moment. This means when your website comes up in a search, there will be a new plus sign that if pressed will show a map to your location and contact details. For this reason alone everybody should get listed on the Local Business Centre.

  • David
    Posted March 28, 2007 at 11:29 am 0Likes

    I have been watching the development of Google Base over the past several months in conjunction with one of our technology partners in the US eNeighborhoods (eneighborhoods.com)

    Google’s focus on real estate listings within Google Base is likely to be a threat to any third-party aggregation portal. That is to say, any portal controlled by an entity other than a franchise group, MLS or lisitng organisation like EAC, where there is a direct relationship with the Agent.

    From a US perspective Google well may be a threat to realtor.com, Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, and other like portals.

    If Google gets the content then it will be tough to compete with Google for traffic and sites like realtor.com and Trulia can’t succeed without traffic.

    Is there a threat to subscription based sites like realestate.com.au, domain.com.au and MyHome, only time will tell.

    I believe the next 12 – 18 months, will be a very interesing place in the Austrlian Real Estate Portal arena

  • valnur
    Posted February 21, 2009 at 8:45 pm 0Likes

    We are in a similar market as Google Base but our product gives structure (while still not imposing any set of predefined categories) to our index and therefore makes it possible for users to not only perform keyword search but also browse hierarchically with the ability to specify unlimited number of filters to refine their search.

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