Back in August last year Google allowed the public to take a peak at the upcoming changes to their search engine algothrim. The update was named Caffeine and although it has yet to be released rumours of its rollout in the UK and US markets indicate it may be imminent.
That article looked at who out of the main real estate portals would be the winner and who would be the loser. Generally the comparison showed that Domain might lose a little ground and Myhome might gain a little ground but market leader Realestate.com.au would show very little change.
Like alot of things on the net search engines rankings never stand still and it’s interesting to compare the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) from that article to those of today. When you do something stands out and that is the dramatic drop in Realestate.com.au rankings. In one case they are have dropped off the front page entirely and in other examples they have dropped pages from the front page.
The same searches conducted 7 months apart show Realestate.com.au have slipped positions as well as 8 front page placements which have just fallen off the results altogether and Domain has been the major beneficiary of this slip. Now they still hold good positioning on the Sydney and Melbourne keywords but everywhere seems to have gone backwards with either lower positions or less pages on the front page. Queensland in particular was effected very badly with a massive 6 our of 20 possible positions filled with links leading back to realestate.com.au reducing down to just one solitary link.
As Realestate.com.au prepare for the release of their new website this cant be good news for the design team. The SEO in the new site appears much better so it will be interesting to see if the new website can claw back what they have lost. They are certainly still the best placed portal on the search engines but the gap has reduced in the past 6 or 7 months. With search providing about 30% or more of the traffic to the portals these changes should correlate to significant changes to the overall traffic to both portals but I dont suspect that the “fantastic” stats will ever show anything but positive numbers.
Realestate.com.au Rankings on Google’s First Page for the following keywords
| Keyword | Google on the 22/03/2010 | Google on the 18/08/2009 |
| Real Estate |
2nd
3rd |
1st
2nd |
| Brisbane Real Estate |
2nd | 2nd
3rd 8th 9th |
| Sydney Real Estate |
1st
2nd |
1st
2nd |
| Melbourne Real Estate |
1st
2nd |
1st
2nd |
| Perth Real Estate |
1st
2nd |
1st
2nd 9th |
| Adelaide Real Estate |
1st
2nd |
1st
2nd 6th 7th |
| Gold Coast Real Estate |
No entry on the first page | 1st
2nd |
These SERP positions cannot be underestimated. The search volume on just the exact Keyword “Real Estate” on Google is reported by the Google Keyword tool to deliver 550,000 just for the month of February in Australia. Whilst more than 11,000,000 searches had the word “Real Estate” in the search term (ie.. brisbane real estate, sydney real estate etc etc ) there was over half a million people that still searched for the fairly generalised term “Real Estate”. That slip in just one position of such a traffic magnet can be costly.
From leaked data in 2006 covering 9,038,794 searches and 4,926,623 clicks SEO specialists have known exactly what different front page positions result in traffic wise. The front page receives 89.82% of all clickthroughs which is why it is vitally important to be on the front page.
The breakdowns from that leaked data resulted in the following:
- 42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks
- 11.90%, 586,100 clicks
- 8.50%, 418,643 clicks
- 6.06%, 298,532 clicks
- 4.92%, 242,169 clicks
- 4.05%, 199,541 clicks
- 3.41%, 168,080 clicks
- 3.01%, 148,489 clicks
- 2.85%, 140,356 clicks
- 2.99%, 147,551 clicks
Now these sort of percentages should only be used as a guide as they are an average across all searches rather than a particular niche subject but they are the best indicator of what a slip in position can translate to in real traffic.
These numbers show a slip from 1st to 2nd could result in 3.5 times less clicks for the search term and when just one search term can generate 500k+ searches per month thats a loss of a lot of eyeballs. Translate this to the other city based searches and an endless supply of other search terms and I suspect that the traffic changes have been quite noticeable to the top 2 portals.
Similarly dropping the extra results off the front page can also have a dramatic effect. The Brisbane example would mean that even though they still hold the 2nd position their overall traffic would be well under half from losing the 3rd, 8th and 9th results.