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.