Wondering where HomeRentalAds.com went to? It is now being redirected to rentals.com.

What does redirected mean? When a site is redirected like HomeRentalAds you are still visiting the actual HomeRentalAds.com site for a fraction of a second and then sent on to the Rentals.com site. This had been announced about a month ago.

This of course is great news for me (RentVine.com) because that means I will now go up in the rankings one spot.

Was this wise of Primedia (the company that owns HomeRentalAds)? No, but I am not complaining because it is good for me.

HomeRentalAds.com just a couple of years ago used to be the #2 home rental web site of the US. Now it is gone – dead – disappeared. I bet Robert Fowler the person who started it is sad to see it go.

I am doing another happy dance right now! Yes Primedia, sometimes I do love you!

From a mass email sent out to HomeRentalAds.com customers:

“On Friday, 7/13/07 HomeRentalAds.com will no longer be accepting new
ad postings.
On Friday, 8/31/07 HomeRentalAds.com will be retired and the URL
will be redirected to Rentals.com.”

HomeRentalAds URL will be “retired”. I wonder if they would want to sell me the domain name?

From this press release Joe Woods from HomeRentalAds starts a new site geared towards the office space market.

” In June 2006, HomeRentalAds was purchased and Woods, along with other employees, found themselves without jobs.”

“While working for HomeRentalAds.com, Woods quickly advanced to the position of marketing manager. He was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the site, search engine optimization, sales, brand identity, and handled customer service. In this capacity, he was credited with establishing the sites’ position as one of the dominant online advertising sources for home rentals and drastically increased sales.”

It will be interesting to see if Joe can get his new site ranked well in the next 6-12 months – if he can repeat his success than this guy knows what he is doing and Primedia lost another good employee.

On Alexa my site RentVine is beating HomeRentalAds in traffic. See the blue line (me) crossing over HomeRentalAds in red.

Looks like another of my predictions I made at the end of 06 is coming true.

My site moved up a another couple of spots for “Denver Rental Homes” today beating out HomeRentalAds on Google. I now rank #6. Denver is a very competitive market, so this is big news for me.

I know some of my readers might be getting tried of my bragging about my upward movement on Google – but I have been waiting a couple of years for this and I gotta brag just a little.

I love Alexa when it shows my site starting to catch my main competitors. For a brief moment in Oct 06 I was actually beating HomeRentalAds.

Not bad for one guy working out of his basement up against a large company. (I am patting myself on my back right now).

I thought I remembered HomeRentalAds being a NARPM affiliate before, when I look at the NARPM directory site now, I can’t find them listed.

So I checked the WayBack Machine and confirmed that they used to be (see bottom of page). The Way Back Machine is a cool site that shows you how sites used to look.

This goes back to my theory that they are just letting HomeRentalAds drop and not take care off it.

I don’t understand this, why pay for a site that used to rank #2 and then just drop it? For Primedia to get value from this purchase they need to hold it up in the rankings because if they let it slip too far another site will grab their current #3 spot.

From my calculations House.info is about to take that #3 site from them. And house.info is a free site.

I am starting to think that Primedia might not be able keep three sites in the top 3 spots while try to cultivate their flagship site Rentals up the rankings all at the same time. Anyone else thinking this too?

In the past few days we have seen:

• Rentals.com came out of beta
• RentClicks is sporting a fancy new logo
• RentalHouses get a new pricing page

But why is HomeRentalAds not getting any attention? Is Primedia planning to let it die a slow death. Why is it not getting any love?