fatinfo.com

Been tracking the keyword “new york real estate” for a very long time and the NYTimes held the number one position for as long as I can remember. Today I saw that it got bumped to the fifth spot in Google, and it is probably temporary or has the search algorithm improved to realize many of the real estate listings in the NYTimes are duplicates from the bigger real estate brokerage houses. This in turn is going to knock some revenue money off the banner and interactive ad units on the right column of their online real estate section.

I think this is a good move by Google considering the NYTimes.com/pages/realestate does not focus exclusively on NY real estate where listings extend from California, Nevada, Florida to international countries. An even when you navigate over to the the New York listings, none of the apartment, or home listings are produced by the NY Times staff.

This is a big win for real estate companies in New York that have been paying a premium as a NYTimes advertiser. It may be time to spend a part of that budget on SEO for ranking first on Google. The race is on for the top four players / brokerage houses that rank above the NYTimes.