I’m considering adding a Sold Data Feed to our site… Would love to hear pros and cons from others who have this data on their site and how they leverage it.
Maybe @Morgan can chime in and tell me how it affects SEO on a site.
My thoughts for use so far are:
Having a more accurate CMA Tool on the site.
Sold Property Alerts for buyers who closed and want to keep an eye on what comparable homes in their neighborhood are selling for.
Happy to chime in:
From an SEO perspective: It’s important to note, that no matter now many “pages” including listings you have on your site, Google will only index a smaller number (based on your overall authority) and so adding more pages, doesn’t help your SEO, in fact it can hurt it.
Here’s how: If you really only have enough juice to rank 100 pages well, and you add 10,000 then Google will be choosing (instead of you) what pages to index. So a $100k mobile home page could take the place in the rankings of a $2M lux home. (no bueno)
On the flip side - if you have a LOT of authority, it’s epic, since then you can rank for high visibility high price sold listings (if you map it correctly using snippets) and garner lots of traffic that way.
We have sold data, and it’s great for us (since we have lots of authority) but we do also get the occasional annoyed person “take my listing off your site, I already bought it” (but I always tell my wife that’s a great excuse to explain that A: It’s a normal feature and B: The only reason they are finding “our” site is because of our exceptional marketing, so if you ever want to sell it again, let us know heh (but then we do also 301 redirect it, because who wants a PO’d future prospect)
On the CMA tool - by default it only uses active data either way, so it would be custom code to modify it use 2 separate feeds (an active and a sold feed) but I agree, depending on the market it could be a benefit there.
And of course - more data = more options, and I do love my data. Just be careful of the custom trap (it’s addicting) once you have more data, you’ll come up with lots of great ideas, and all of a sudden you’ll be spending a LOT on investing stuff that would probably be better spent on PPC and SEO.
Not trying to talk myself out of a sale here, but those are my thoughts.
Great question! Great answer! What if our board rules say the sold data has to be behind a paywall? My thoughts are it won’t help SEO, but it could generate more leads. However, I would think those leads would be comparable to registration leads from an IDX feed, which we don’t even bother with. Am I wrong?
Ours has to be “behind a paywall” but we still manage to rank for them 
But yes, they are no better than IDX reg (in fact most people who contact us are the owners and they usually want us to take down their listings for privacy reasons).
But hey, we now have owners in our DB along with their address, right? (and my advise is always jump on it right away, use the 301 redirect tool to take it down) show them you are responsive and care.
Also a good reason to ask “why” they were Googling their own address (maybe they are thinking of selling?)
I have/had member of your team trying to add a DDF feed for sold data into my website for a couple of years but I think they hit a roadblock with REBGV. I haven’t received a recent update but have you had any luck with anyone else’s site who belongs to the REBGV? @Morgan @Alex
Not that I know of, no sorry.
Great explanation @Morgan! Isn’t there a way to index or add a no follow to the sold properties so it doesn’t cause those potential SEO issues you mentioned? I’ve considered adding sold listings to my site as well (PearlAntonacci.com) but still have concerns about the SEO ramifications.
Yes there is - selectively it’s more difficult, but enmasse you most certainly could have the robots team put all sold in a specific folder and then apply a no index no follow in there (to block solds) and you could also have it blocked in robots.txt for good measure if you really wanted to be sure.
I just added sold data and I think it helps time on site metrics and CTR a lot as many of my buyers want to know comps so they leave the site to go find them. They can search them all on my site now and I think it’s an important feature.