Since the NARPM national convention is going to be in Scottsdale this September I thought I better work on the Phoenix market before I get there so I have sometime to sell.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing just terrible ranking wise in Google for my Phoenix page, now I am starting to get better rankings in Google. Now I just need to become a member and get a booth.

Do you think I should get my booth next to Rentals.com?

I got to meet some nice folks at the NARPM Denver conference this week (In the order I think I met them):

• Nathan Voegtle from RentalHomesPlus
• Brian Frisby from RentalHomesPlus
• Mike Anderson from HomeRentals.net
• Lisa Ray from RentMarketer
• David Borden from SmartBox (Former President of RentClicks)
• Matt Teichman from MyNewPlace
• The 3 ladies at the Rentals.com booth – sorry I forgot your names (Karen?).
• Tim Howell from his own law practice
• Ray Scarabosio past NARPM president

Sorry to those who I met but didn’t get cards from – perhaps I will remember you next time.

I should have got a booth for $50 so I could have met property managers but my bonehead marketing department (me) screwed that up.

I hope to become a member of NARPM and exhibit in Phoenix unless NARPM declines my membership after my last post.

Currently NARPM.org does not comply with Google’s guidelines. Below is a quote from Matt Cutts the lead on controlling web spam for Google.

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.” Those people can probably guess that Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.”

Google doesn’t like when site owners either buy links or sell links – in this case NARPM is selling links. Update: To prove this point – here is more from Matt Cutts:

“As long as were talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. Theres a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is roboted out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.’

In the interview with Matt Cutts at a conference I attended several months ago – skip to minute 7:23 to hear what he has to say on paid links.

[youtube wpcZyNW9E-w]

NARPM does not comply in two ways:

1. NARPM requires members to pay extra each year for a link from the NARPM site to the member’s site. Update: Wendy Frenzel has told me that NARPM is now including the link in the yearly fee – however when I just looked at the NARPM site it says the following: “Affiliate Members may have a link to their website on the NARPM site for an annual fee of only $50.”
2. NARPM is selling the home page link to Rentals.com as part of their $15K-$20K Official Partner package.

My first recommendation to NARPM is stop charging NARPM members extra for a link back to their site. One of NARPM’s missions is to support the property managers through networking. If NARPM is going to support networking it only seems natural to me that NARPM provide a link to the members web site for free. (I am not the only one that feels this way)

My second recommendation to comply with Google’s quality guidelines is to place what is referred to as a NoFollow tag on the Rentals.com link on the home page – or delete that link all together.

Just this past week Google now offers a way for people to automatically tell them who is buying and selling links – so I think it is in NARPM’s best interest to be ethical and not sell links anymore.

I am going to be wearing this yellow shirt shown below to the Denver NARPM conference this Thursday – if you see a guy in this shirt please stop me and say hello. Even if you are a competitor – I would like to meet everyone.

This is my very first NARPM conference so you will probably see me wandering aimlessly. I am not sure if I should attend the sessions or hang out in the exhibit hall – so if you see a guy not sure what to do – that’ll be me!

I will not have a booth this conference – but I am pretty sure I will have one for the national NARPM conference in Phoenix.

I had an idea to do some coverage of next week’s Denver NARPM conference – such as write-ups, audio and perhaps video recordings of some of the sessions. This might be nice for the people that might not able to attend and perhaps get more readers to this blog.

I had a feeling that NARPM would not allow me to do any audio or video taping of the sessions which normal for a conference but I thought I would a least ask.

So I sent an email several weeks ago to the Denver NARPM chapter and never got a reply back. So then I emailed Sylvia Hill (president of NARPM) last week and I have not heard back from her either. Sylvia is usually very good about returning emails so I got to thinking my request must have been forwarded to a law firm somewhere.

I know that it is perfectly legal for me to write up my thoughts on the sessions here on my blog – but since I am getting the silent treatment from NARPM I will not be doing any taping.

I can just see the people over a NARPM just shaking their heads and asking who is this Dave Dugdale guy and why is he asking us these questions?

I noticed today the NARPM Official Partner logo now links to the Rentals.com site and not RentClicks anymore.

I am not sure if it had anything to do with this post or the email I sent to Organization Management Group (one of the firms that controls the NARPM site) about it not being a very good user experience.

So this will be interesting to watch what will happen with this change. My prediction is that RentClicks will fall in the ranking and Rentals.com will move up in the rankings.

A link from the NARPM home page is huge. Think of it this way – pretty much all NARPM member web sites link to NARPM which creates the huge ring of trust for NARPM – well when NARPM links out to someone from their home page that trust is passed along to the linked site giving them higher rankings.

I will report back in a few weeks or so to see what happens to RentClicks in the rankings – it will be interesting to see RentClicks slide in the rankings. Perhaps we will witness the end of the RentClicks domination in the Google rankings.

Perhaps we will see if that link is worth $15K a year. My guess is it is worth it.

I noticed that the NARPM Denver Chapter’s web site (rentproperty.com) is now redirecting to a page on the national NARPM site. I will assume that this is happening for other chapters as well.

The old site was a “A collaborative effort of HomeRentals.net and The Denver Chapter”. Looks like all that work that HomeRentals.net did may go to waste?

However I read in the latest newsletter from Susan Melton the Denver President:

“Check out our new and improved website http://
chapters.narpm.org/C006/ for more information on the
conference and the great line up of other upcoming Denver
Chapter events we have for you. Don’t worry; we still have
our domain name ‘rentproperty.com’ we just need the tech
guys to make it all work. “

So perhaps the old site will still have a purpose. If not I would have been interested in buying that old domain from them.

Does anyone know what plans they have for the old site?

After the discussion on this post I was curious what the Official NARPM Partnership is going for these days.

I am getting word from a very good source that last year it went for $15K to RentClicks.

The phrase “Official Partner” kind of bothers me. I think “Official Sponsor” should be the correct phrase.

When NARPM says “partner” it really sounds like they are in bed together. From what I understand RentClicks pays them the cash and NARPM throws the RentClicks logo on every thing they produce. (I still think NARPM should not sell out like this)

I could be wrong on this one since I am not even a member of NARPM. Please if someone has more insight to what the word partner implies – please share.