As far as I can remember RentClicks used to rank #1 for the phrase, “Homes for rent in Denver” on Google. Now they rank around #75 today.
It is to early to tell if this will be permanent, perhaps by the time you read this they might be back at #1 again.
This is something I have been hoping for. Where Google sees that the top three domains are own by the same company Google may decide that having all three in the top 10 is not a good user experience for those searching.
Primedia has not yet changed the ownership over on the WhoIs records for RentalHouses yet. My guess is they are waiting to the last second to do so in the fear that once they do it might fall in the rankings. I am not sure when you are required to make this change for the company they use, but I know they have rules you must follow on providing accurate WhoIs records. For the company I use I have to make the change in 5 business days.
Note: I am not trying to give RentalHouses a hard time, I am just curious to see what happens when they change their WhoIs record.
If you think I am a little nuts on the issue, just look what has happened in the vacation rental space. When HomeAway purchased several of the top 10 sites last year HomeAway is now having issues keeping them all in the top 10 in Google. Usually only one HomeAway site will be present in the top 10 at one time, and the sites seem to rotate sharing the top 10 in Google.
Also if you are interested, RentVine ranks #17 on Google for this phrase.
Update 2/25/07: RentClicks is back at #1 again.
Related Articles
2 users responded in this post
“Please note that inclusion in Google’s search results is free and that our crawl process is completely automated; we don’t accept payment for inclusion in our index, nor do we manipulate search results by hand.”
- from http://google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39334&topic=8996
[...] know I have nagged about this before, but Primedia finally changed the ownership of RentalHouses.com from Rob Massey to CSI (Primedia). [...]
Leave A Reply