Amy great question...I've been wondering that myself? I just started with the P2 blog and it is getting picked up rather quickly. I posted a similar question on the P2 message board. Nonetheless, I'm interested to hear the benefits over the p2 blog.

Amy, I get results from my Point 2 blog and Active Rain. The key is to use your main keywords as part of your Title. For example, I use Lansing Real Estate in most of my titles. Which gives me free exposure when someone is looking for Lansing real estate. I use 3 blogs and normally publish the same article on all of them but mix the titles. Happy blogging and greetings form Lansiong Michigan. Mike

Does anyone know if you get penalized by the search engines for posting duplicate info on different blogs?

Reliberation offers a free blog and a free subscription to BlogTalk. I think you can sign up straight from your point2 office. I, too, am new to blogging with a lot to learn.

I'm also curious about duplicate content.

Mike- Any snow this weekend in Lansing? I woke up Thanksgiving morning and everything was white. Last week I still had a few roses in bloom. I live at the thumb knuckle.

I posted for the first time today on my active rain blog. I posted one of my listings. It's in Metamora MI. This evening that post was showing up on page 1 for Google for Metamora MI real estate. SAME DAY.

I'm going to post something about market conditions for another town on active rain and on my P2 blog. Exact same content. I'll let you know how it goes.

Have a good evening!

Jackie

Jackie & Mike - great to hear that. I have been considering using active rain. I hear so many people speaking about how quickly it gets picked up.

<< Does anyone know if you get penalized by the search engines for posting duplicate info on different blogs? >>

The answer is yes.  If you have different blogs, don't copy and paste your material.  Change it up a little.

Amy, Chantal, Jackie, Steven:

Mike is onto something and I would like to share a little more detail.  

Which blog does better?  Blogs with more traffic, better google page rank, and more "related content" will place your content higher up the SEO ladder.  For these reasons, the more heavily trafficked Active Rain, and Wordpress are great platforms, as is the site blog that comes with your p2 site - which posts to the Point2Homes.com public real estate search site.  

You can get great seach engine placement from Active Rain, Wordpress, the blog built into your P2 web site, or Reliberation,  (probably in that order) if you follow some simple SEO guidelines such as explained in an article I wrote recently.  

Detailed instructions on blogging for SEO can be found at the link below:

http://nls.point2.com/message_board/view_topic.asp?ParentID=68553

Reliberation probably gets less traffic than the others and so is not quite as helpful for SEO - but it does give you another inbound link from a related site and is very useful.      

Duplicate content penalties seem to kick in when you use canned content or news feed content that is used on a great many sites (such as the content that comes with your p2agent site).

Posting the same thing on two blogs does not seem to hurt the search engine placement for the content.  I post the same thing at Active Rain and Reliberation all the time.  Both posts do fine.  AR seems to outrank Relib though.    

Will three blogs that are the same content hurt you?  I don't know if anybody knows exactly how many times the same content has to be used before it causes the duplicate content penalty.  I might start changing a few sentences, re-wording things a bit after two blogs...

Although ActiveRain and Relib are great blogs, in my opinion, REW blogs are the best when it comes to SEO.

I did a test a few months back.  I wrote a blog on one of the communities I'm serving.  I posted the same blog on ActiveRain, Relib and REW.  The next day, all 3 blogs were picked up by Google.  Here are the rankings.

REW #1

ActiveRain #8

Relib #14

REW blogs are extremely well structured with Google in mind.

Thanks for reminding me of Real Estate Webmasters, Russell. It is a very good site. I signed up months ago and haven't utilized it much. I posted today.

Amy, did you get that? REW = Real Estate Webmasters

Very interesting stuff, Russell. Thanks for sharing.

One more thing about REW.

You can post messages on their forum, where other agents and web professionals will get involved in a discussion.  You can have upto 3 links in your signature.  These links can point to your site, your blog, your internal page, etc.

Until you posted 300 messages, your links will have a nofollow tag.  Which means that when Google is spidering their forum, it will not follow to the links in your signature.

Once you hit 300 messages, a nofollow tag is removed from all your links.  That means that the next time Google is spidering their forum, it will find 300 links pointing to your site.

Since it's coming from REW, it will give your site some serious juice.  I'm closing in to 150 messages now.  But I only have been involved in their forums in that past few months or so.

If you want to find out just how good these guys are, go to Google and search for 'real estate'.  They're #5 out of 410,000,000 results.

That tells me that these guys know what they're doing.  I don't think there's another web design/SEO company that can make that statement.

One probelm with Active Rain is that you are blogging in a sea of 60,000 other people. Yes, posts there get indexed swiftly, but the same thing can happen with a personal blog after some time and work (posts on my blog are indexed and well ranked in 15 minutes or less).

There is some question as to who "owns" the content on AR. If (when) they sell to somone, will you retain the rights to your content, or will the purchaser get it? The same could be said for any public blog platform, including Reliberation.

For the blog platforms that provide the hosting like TypePad, REW and Wordpress.com (which is different from a self-hosted Wordpress.org blog), you have the same sort of issues as AR-- you are building content for someone else's domain.

Why not build that content on YOUR domain?

I don't think the search engines care what software you post with. What's going to get search positioning is content and links.

I don't think anything can beat having your own blog. Regardless of the platform used, a personal blog will, *over time* give you more control and more branding exposure than a community blog. ANd you'll be putting content on YOUR domain, not someone elses.

An advantage to using the P2 blog platform that comes with Pro and Premium sites is it is "on domain" -- it shares a domain name with your main site. That's beneficial for both your blog AND your site. It's biggest drawback is the lack of ability and/or difficulty in customizing it.

A self-hosted Wordpress blog is very customizable. And you can build a brand that is YOURS on a domain that YOU own and control.

The SEO aspects of blogging are nice. But what blogging really does is provide you with a way to connect with prospects and clients, to demonstrate your expertise, and more importantly, your personality. And it is the single best way to learn that I've found. Learn about anything -- real estate, market conditions, tech stuff, marketing, what ever.

Sorry for the lengthy comment...

Amy - I can't remember if I told you about a real estate blogging conference in Scottsdale this Friday. It should be quite informative.

Info here:

http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/real-estate-blogging-seminar-in-scottsdale/568

I agree with jay. Even though you might get quick results from posting on an established blog, it is tempting to become dependent on quick results and fail to build your own blog over time -- building your own blog with your own domain is the best long term strategy.

I do both, but to tell you the truth, my blog with my domain name does as well most of the time with search engines. I have a new blog that has gotten good results quickly.

It's all about content and popularity.

Like what has been said before, even if you manipulate your blog efforts to get good search results, if the blog is not somewhat unique and does not have good content, then those who click on it will not stay and will not turn into clients.

This is an excellent thread with great advice. I hope more people comment on this with the same good questions and great feedback so it can move into the 'most popular' category.

Jay, a quick question on Blog ethics. Being a blog owner, do you consider it SPAM or do you take objection to someone posting the same article on your blog as they have posted on several other blogs?

Chantal - I am the only person who posts to my blog, so that isn't a concern. Well, I have had a couple of "guests posts" but that's rare. I do ask guest authors to send original content -- I don't see the point in putting something on Phoenix Real Estate Guy that has already been posted somewhere else.

I participate on a couple of "multi-author blogs".  (http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog and http://www.GeekEstateBlog.com). The expectation of the people managing those blogs is that original content is posted.

Massive platforms like Active Rain don't seem to have any rules against the same post appearing in multiple places. I don't know if that is because they don't care, or because there is no way for them to manage it due to the shear volume of posts they get.

Amy - My blog is a self-hosted Wordpress blog. I started it long before P2 had a blogging platform and it's far to well established and has too many posts and comments to move to the P2 platform.

Glad you got into the conference. Shailesh does a great job in these conferences. Looking forward to meeting you too!

Thanks Amy. The blog will be three years old in May - that's an eternity in real estate blog years.

Jay said:  "I don't think the search engines care what software you post with."

Mike said "It's all about content and popularity".

Put those two thoughts together and you may have a more complete good idea.  Higher ranked, higher trafficked blog sites with more keyword saturation, more content, and more frequent updates (like AR, Wordpress, Relib, and etc ) will do better in the SHORT TERM - no matter which platform you choose.  Working more than one is even better!  

To sum:  The Big Three blogs will give you a faster SEO payoff but may not give you as much market impact.  A personally hosted blog "CAN" do very well, especially at letting you reveal more of yourself in hopes of building relationship bridges to prospects and affirming client relationships - but it takes time.

The right answer to most "EITHER - OR" questions is "BOTH AND".  To get things started, you might want to start your own personally hosted blog, but make sure to re-post your articles, or "summaries" of your articles on the Big Three - and always end with links to your personal blog.

BTW:  About rights and who you are helping when you post on the big blogs...  Your posts on those other blogs help them AND you...  As a contributor to a public work, your content helps the other site with their own SEO (traffic, related content, keyword saturation, etc) AND it helps you with the same things.

As far as losing your rights to your material, I don't think they can remove your name from your words - but they might quote it in promotional material, or make a book of it, or otherwise benefit.  When you sign up to a blog site you agree to something called TOS or Terms of Service.  In that agreement, generally license the blog site / owner to use your material, - but you generally do not surrender your rights by posting.  The only way to know for sure is to read the TOS : )  

You will probably get much more traffic having a Wordpress blog, than a P2A blog.