January must of been a stellar month for people searching for rentals because Feb took a slight hit and all the major sites are down in traffic.

Hotpads took a big jump in January – however I am thinking of taking them off the list since they are now displaying homes for sale.

Rentals had a very good month, actually better than last years peak month July.

RentalHomesPlus had a very good month as well.

RentalsOnline.com doubled their traffic – I gotta go check out why.

I normally do a write up of where all the rental sites stand each month, but since Dan has already done it I will link over to him.

Basically everyone fell in traffic except for RentalHomesPlus which held on to it’s previous number.

I looked at my stats today and saw a large increase for the searched word “RentVine” in my analytics program.

My first thought was, “Cool! I am getting more brand recognition and people are searching for my company name to navagate to my site.”

Then I looked at where the searches came from and quickly figured out why I got the large spike. All the searches came from locations where my competitors are and they were looking for my blog since I took the “Blog” link off my main navagation bar at the top of the home page.

I took it off because my blog really doesn’t add much value for renters or people looking to place an ad on my site. (There I said it, my blog is lame!)

For those of you that don’t use an RSS reader (and you should) and like to visit my blog to see if I have blogged about anything new, when you go to the home page – look at the footer for the blog link.

I managed to take the number 5 spot in traffic this month up from my previous number 6 spot.

Unfortunately, I except to see my traffic fall next month because I redirected all my subdomains after 3 years of use. Here is what I wrote in reply to Robbie’s comment:

Timely question Robbie,
As of last night RentVine does not use subdomains any longer. I made that change right after I got back from the conference.

I got to talk to some Google engineers about this issue and finally made the hard decision to redirect my subdomain pages. I believe I will see a hit in traffic in about 2 weeks from both Google and Yahoo.

One of the Google engineers I talked to (at Matt Cutts level) said to avoid multiple doorway pages created just for Google or creating subdomains for only one page. I told him that a lot of sites in my industry use this approach and he asked me for a list of sites that did this, but I decided not to until I clean up my site first.

The list of subdomain users in this industry is long:

• RentalHomesPlus.com (I saw the Cars.com SEO at the conference)
• Apartments.com
• Sublet.com
• House.info (excessive subdomain spam!)
• ApartmentGuide.com
• CityLeases.com
• Tenant.com

and many more.

Sounds like the subdomain power-play is coming to an end.

I have decided to go the safe route, rather than getting hit with a penalty or filter in the future.

Robbie in your list above I am pretty sure RentalHouses.com is not doing this – however they are buying links from sites like usacitiesonline.com which might get them thrown in the Google jail one of these days.

Even though I know I am going to get hit with less traffic in a few weeks it actually feels good to be totally spam free now.

For the first time I went over 100 subscribers for this blog. I am amazed at this, I never thought when I started this blog over a year and half ago that I would get anyone to subscribe to such a niche topic.

If you like to subscribe to this blog to be alerted of new posts or comments you can click on the RSS link in the menu bar.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, watch this video I created to get started – it is very easy.

This past month Rentals.com took a huge hit in traffic from their mistake – almost to 2nd place.

www.ThatRentalSite.com traffic took off this past month and outpaced www.hotpads.com.

Not sure why (perhaps it has to do with the current real estate market) but the interest in “houses for rent” has not started to do it’s normal season dip yet.

It appears that the number of queries for “houses for rent” on Google is above the normal January bump – which is saying a lot where the chart ends in mid October.