
Cross Links vs. Page Dilution: What’s Best for Your Real Estate Website?
In the competitive realm of real estate, optimizing your website for better search engine rankings is paramount. Recently, I’ve been working on a project for a real estate client, and I couldn’t help but notice an interesting phenomenon: despite having comparable numbers of backlinks and authority, their main rival consistently ranks higher. This led me to ponder a few crucial questions about the structure and strategy of web pages.
Consider this scenario: you have a dedicated page on your website that focuses exclusively on your town. This page is rich with localized content and tailored specifically to potential homebuyers in that area. Now, envision another page that also highlights your town but includes cross links to various nearby communities.
On one side, the single-town page has a clear focus, honing in on localized keywords that can enhance its relevance. In contrast, the page filled with cross links may dilute its primary focus and potentially weaken its keyword optimization due to the inclusion of names of surrounding towns.
However, there’s another aspect to consider. If your site contains multiple pages for different towns—each linking to pages about all the other neighboring towns—could this strategy yield greater benefits? This tactic resembles what our competitors are doing: encompassing numerous nearby towns and linking them all together.
When I first joined this project, a significant issue I addressed was the redundancy of meta descriptions across various pages. Each page, unfortunately, featured identical meta descriptions listing all the towns served by the real estate company. By reworking these descriptions to concentrate on single towns, we observed notable improvements in our search rankings.
To me, having every page filled with names and links to every other town seems akin to using the same meta descriptions on multiple pages—potentially detrimental to the Search Engine Optimization of each page. Yet, it appears to be effective for the competition.
Now, I find myself at a crossroads: should we adopt a similar linking strategy as our competitors, or is there a different underlying factor contributing to their higher rankings? I’d love to gather insights and opinions from fellow professionals in the field. What do you think? Is focusing your pages on a single town and optimizing for specific keywords the right approach, or does diversifying with cross-linking hold the key to better rankings? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated!