I used to get over 300 a people a day on my site from searching for RentClicks when the redirect to Rentals.com happened.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

RentClicks Is Slowly Being Forgotten [Graph]

These are the top 11 search terms I like to track for Colorado Springs. I just gained 4 number 1 spots on Google.

[This is me not being humble:] Yes, I am doing another happy Google dance right now.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

Google Is Loving RentVine In Colorado Springs

Since I give CSI such as hard time, I thought it might be nice and throw them a bone today.

CSI you might want to change your htaccess file to redirect http:// rentclicks.com to rentals.com so your customers don’t receive a 401.

I understand that many of the CSI folks read my blog on almost a daily basis. Just check out the visits I get from the Atlanta area each month below. That doesn’t even include the 111 visits from Suwanee, 50 for Smyrna, Marietta, Dallas, Alparetta, and more.

I have sent polite emails to many of their lead people in the company to introduce myself but no one is emailing me back – I guess a memo went around that said not to speak with Dave Dugdale. I am sure they are not afraid of me, I am just one guy working part time at this and what do they have, like 100 people competing against me?

I wonder if I will get any good karma from this post?

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

Free Tip For CSI – Fix Your 401 Issue

Since I write about RentClicks a lot on this blog I get many visitors to this blog looking for more information about them.

In the list above from my stats program I found it interesting that people that found my blog with the keyword phrase “rentclicks” stayed longer than the people that use “rentclicks.com”.

My guess is it would be the other way around. Either way I am happy that people are spending around 3 minutes on my blog to get more info about RentClicks.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

Time Spent Learning More About RentClicks

Don’t get me wrong – I am happy about this, but it is a little sad to see the top competitor go away. For the previous owners such as Dave Borden this must be a little frustrating seeing this happen too – they worked on that site so hard for years to see it just vanish.

I gotta think that many people do not know about this yet – if you are new to this site and want to learn more you can start here at this post about RentClicks.com.

The next site to disappear will be HomeRentalAds.com at the end of August.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

RentClicks.com Is Now Redirecting to Rentals.com

What happened was on 6/15 RentClicks, for some odd reason, placed a disallow statement in their robots.txt file. What that means is RentClicks was telling search engines like Google to go away and not take their content. Slowly over the last week the page count on Google for RentClicks dropped from about 30K to almost zero (pretty fun for a competitor like myself to watch!).

Then last night around 10pm my time, I could see that the RentClicks techs were doing some major work to the Rental.com and RentClicks.com sites and corrected the robots file. What they ended up doing was disallowing robots for the rental.com beta site and allowing the spiders to cache RentClicks again so Google does not see a duplication issue–which was smart of them.

So, what does this all mean? I am not completely sure what they are doing over there in “RentClick’s Land”, but my guess is they discovered that they made a huge mistake on the robots and wanted the RentClicks traffic back, which has taken a nose dive the past week.

But does it matter? They are only days away from redirecting RentClicks to Rentals.com.

For a search engine guy like myself, it has been really fun to watch. It was also a good lesson on how Google ranks web sites.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

RentClicks.com Only Has Nine Pages Cached In Google

Sure the home page is a bit different (although most of the text is the same) but look at the state and city pages – they are about 95% the same in text, layout and URL structure.

I think it is a bit funny that CSI is telling us:

“By leveraging the best features of three sites we are able to streamline operations and provide innovative new features without compromising our premier customer service.”

I can’t see any of the others sites (HomeRentalAds and RentalHouses) mixed in to Rental.com at all.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the only reason they are switching RentClicks content over to Rentals.com is because the like the domain name Rentals.com better?

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

Rental.com Is A Near Duplicate of RentClicks.com

“The RentClicks and HomeRentalAds.com brands have undoubtedly established themselves in the property management industry and we believe by redirecting them to Rentals.com existing customers will experience even more success. By leveraging the best features of three sites we are able to streamline operations and provide innovative new features without compromising our premier customer service. This means greater brand recognition, greater consumer impact, and more exposure for your listings.”

I personally think this is a mistake to do this because CSI is losing years of branding from RentClicks.

But since I am a competitor this makes me happy. Go here to learn a lot more about RentClicks.com being redirect to Rentals.com.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

Why is RentClicks.com Being Redirected To Rentals.com?

Once again HomeRentalAds is not getting any love from CSI – no beta announcement over on that site.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

RentClicks Beta Open to Public

Well here is another one:

This is a graph from Google Trends for the keyword “RentClicks“.

For me looking at the bottom dip can be none other than Thanksgiving vacation and the highest peak appears to be right after the 4th of July vacation.

So we should hit the peak of the rental season (people looking for rentals) in a few weeks.

Post from: Dave Dugdale RentVine.com

RentClicks Seasonal Search