Zillow Asleep at the SEO Wheel?
Zillow has a few jobs open but none for an inhouse SEO manager. Perhaps they should?
Trulia, who optimize their pages fantastically well - from both the user and search engine point of view - may very well catch them. Here’s the compete graph:
The two are not in the same league yet perhaps but they are close.
I’d wager Trulia gets the majority of traffic from Google. The first step to getting organic page referrals is to have your content indexed. Here’s how many pages Trulia has in Google:
And here’s Zillow:
I have no idea how much traffic Zillow is getting from Google’s organic results but I’d also wager they are probably missing out on 1m uniques a month.
Homegain gets millions of people from Google organic results a month. Folks like ZipRealty are the same. To have a site like Zillow only have its homepage included in the main Google index is baffling.
I couldn’t imagine they would have any spam penalties and their pagerank for their one page in the index is very strong (7/10). Which would lead me to believe that they could gain a million people a month by spending $10k to optimize their on page content and site structure to make it more easily crawlable. Baffling that they haven’t already.
When you do a site:zillow.com search and repeat the search with the omitted results included, Zillow shows up with 128,000 pages in Google. While that’s fewer than Trulia (which comes up as 451,000 pages when I do a search), it’s not like Zillow isn’t on there.