What Google Can Tell You About Competitors

Perhaps you’ve used Google trends to compare your portal to a competitor. Well there are other ways to see what your rival is doing – or not doing.

A fascinating article published on Business2 by Glenn Batten shows that it is possible for a company’s confidential information to become available on Google if that computer is accessible from the Internet.

In this case, the company is Australia’s number 2 portal, domain.com.au. Glenn’s article describes how by searching with some key terms on Google you can find literally hundreds of ‘inactive’ listings, which represent closed estate agent accounts with the portal.

“Whilst these accounts have no property in the directory anymore, nor are they in the agents directory on the portal the pages are still active and therefore are still indexed by Google and continue to appear in the search engine.”

Glenn found 3370 individual agent profiles that were inactive, but still listed by Google.

As Glenn says: “I can’t think of any reason this information should be in the public domain and it is just poor housekeeping by Domain IT staff. If you were an REA salesperson and a new agent was considering one of the two portals this list would help sway them your way quickly.”

We suggest you read the full article here, as it shows the serious ramifications of SEO, search engine rankings, and the wonderful possibilities of Google.

1. Google Eyeing trulia.com?

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2. Real Estate Added to Google Maps – What it Means for Australian Property Portals

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3. Is Google Beginning to Lose Its Grip?

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4. Real Estate Search on Google Maps

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5. Google Rumoured to be Hiring Online Real Estate Sales People

   Rumours emanating out of Sydney today indicate that Google is aggressively looking to hire a field sales team to target the Sydney real estate market. Sources said that Google had approached a number of sales people from domain.com.au in an effort to hire them as field sales people for the Google real estate initiative. Sources also believed that Google may be initially targeting the Inner West region of Sydney. If these rumours are true, is Google entering the traditional online classifieds space with a traditional online classifieds model?...