Viddler

I suggest you know your information about myRealPage before you go commenting on their product.



myRealPage allows you full control of the CSS and layout, in fact if you are knowledgeable or know a designer, you can create full blow custom looking sites with their product, not just re-skinning the CSS.



Also it does not cost anything to change a theme with myRealPage as you stated, you can freely change to a new theme in seconds with their product.



Hope you are getting lots of kick backs from Ubertor to use there inferior product.



PS Ian your Ubertor site is frustrating to use, too many new windows open and actually searching for listings on your site was a chore.

Has any MyRealPage client ever left a positive review for it?

I can't find any. Good for Ubertor to have such a supportive community around it.

They must be doing something right.

I used to have a MyRealPage Brick. I am still angry at Ray their Vancouver Sales Man who sold me away from my well ranked website.

Prior to moving to MyRealPage I was getting about 3 Quality Leads a week from Google and Yahoo.

I was just building my site over time and started it ages ago... It was not pretty but got me leads and helped my sell listings. It could be found for most Vancouver Real Estate Searches in the top 10.

ANYWAY; Ray promised me a move to them will give me a great looking site as well as ENSURED I would keep all my Google Leads.

After 3 months with them; I noticed a significant decline in leads to the point at month 5 I had NONE!

I tried asking Ray why. He said he would have to look into it and get back to me. Well, he never did.

I then hounded him; as this was my livelihood; and he actually stopped taking my calls.

So I hired a professional Search Engine Optimizer; who explained that my new and "improved" MyRealPage site violated almost every Google, Yahoo and MSN Guideline because all the listings are hidden in a frame structure and make extensive use of flash.

Tim my Search Engine Hired Gun gave me this link http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 which of course supported his claim.

Hey Matter J, are you Ray? I noticed the lower case "m" in the name MyRealPage...

Guess it does not matter; just wanted to make people aware that you should know the full story about one possible provider out there.

Thanks for tanking my leads myRealPage ! you should rename to aRealFarse.

Ian thanks for the headup about Ubertor.

I just Googled your name "Ian Watt" and saw your site came up first and had a fancy site menu below it; just like Microsoft. Your site also have a nice description with the link in Google.

Just to compare; I looked for a colleagues site still on myRealFarse and googled them... "John McGregor" and got nothing, so I added "whistler" and googled "John McGregor Whistler" and found the link to their site buried down the page with no professional menu and their description talked about myRealPage instead of them! "Check myRealPage.com Mail - Download myRealPage.com Private Office."

Ray; you'll know who I am as soon as I cancel. I dont trust you to keep my site up till I leave; cause of your mandatory contract! I know understand why you locked me in to a contract!

Sincerely,

Good Riddens

ps. Beware of MyRealPage ... there is a reason they make you sign a minimum of a one year contract.

Please read my detailed response to claims made in this video and in other materials by Ubertor regarding technical issues and MyRealPage.

http://myrealpage-alias604.blogspot.com/2008/11/myrealpage-vs-ubertor-let-talk.html

--Bill Skrypnyk
Technical Director of myRealPage.com

wwtddn, on an odd chance that you are a real person, let me address your post here. My name is Bill Skrypnyk and I am the Technical Director with MyRealPage.



I am sorry that you feel so passionately bad about MyRealPage (again, unless you are a competitor disguised as a commentator). Please call our main office and convey to them your grievances and, as a business rule, if they are valid, you will be free to take to business anywhere you wish. We always honour website transitions.



Let me see if I can address the concerns you have posted:

(comments appear to be limited in size, so I appologize if there end up being duplicates)

You had a well-ranked site before you signed up with MyRealPage. This probably means that you had good, original content. If you moved this content to MyRealPage and noticed a complete eclipse of your rank, it means that we practically sabotaged your website: rolled it into a solid flash site, hid all web links, did everything via AJAX, rendered all your pages as images... Of course, none of that happened. It takes a lot for a search engine to be turned away from a website, unless you have explicit block rules in your robots.txt. This reasoning leads one to think that search engines are pretty dumb and easily confounded; which we know is not true. The bottom line is this: what was it that you could do in your old website that had rank that you couldn't continue doing with MyRealPage one?

- You claim that Ray "ENSURED" that you will keep your leads. The truth is that it's impossible to make these sorts of assurances, neither for MyRealPage nor Ubertor: there are too many factors involved, most of which are under your control. Ray knows better than that, and he tells me that this is against his principle to do. I will leave it at that...

-Your SEO company told you that MyRealPage "violated almost every" Google Webmaster Guidelines, etc. I would be more than pleased to address these in detail if you post them; I especially like the "almost every": I wonder which ones we didn't violate :) If you follow the link you pasted in, it will take you to Google Webmaster Guidelines main page: I don't know what you meant by that... Is the link broken?

Meanwhile, you mention "extensive" use of Flash. Ok, let's see: We use flash for some of our themes' (btw, not all) top banners. That's all (and it's not to say that using Flash is inherently bad: always think of your web visitors and your site's usability, that's what Google tells you in its guidelines). We don't employ flash for anything else. This flash object doesn't carry any hidden content-related payload and can be seen on par with a simple static image; and hence would have no impact on the availability of content on your website. If you are refering to Flash menus that are in a couple of our themes; then those are always duplicated in the markup of the pages; so again, no content-related or reachability-related consequences. (Ubertor uses flash for its listing photos, Ian for posting videos in his blogs, or virtual tours: is that "extensive use" of flash?)

Yes, we do iframe our listings. This iframe is very tightly integrated and has no usability implications for the website visitor. Do you mean to say that your listing info in your old website got you rank? Was that info manually entered? If the listings were automatically imported for you, then can you at least mention the website provider? We expect listing related leads for our customers to come from searches via well-known and authoritative "portals", like realtylink.org or mls.ca, instead of "freehand" searches via search engines. Everyone knows these sites and if your listing info is linked via virtual tour or realtor's website, the leads land in your website.

From there, MyRealPage has a great way to provide the "stickiness" for the leads by offering them to use alternative and better search means on the realtor's website; or even better, sign up for the Virtual Office Website (VOW) and get up-to-date and complete information, without 48 hour delay as happens with mls.ca and realtylink. Besides, VOW provides great tools to buyers to save their searches, mark favourites and be notified about changes in listing activity in their searches, etc... It's a great way to have your leads or clients come back to your website, not just find it, because they will find what they are actually looking for, i.e. information on ALL listings in Greater Vancouver, not just yours.

Be it as it may, MyRealPage now includes all your listing activity in automatic blogs: New, Solds, Open Houses; these listings are automatically brought in for you from the Real Estate Board's database and you essentially have to do nothing, perhaps, only edit the templates for these blog postings to differentiate yourself. So the listing information is available for search indexing as part of your website.

Contrary to what some may tell you, your rank with search engines will not depend on a fine-tuned meta information in your pages (which you still have full control over with MyRealPage). Your ranking will depend on a good, original, relevant content. That's what modern search engines know how to do well. Don't believe me: please do read Google Webmaster Guidelines, let me quote a couple:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines...
(and my favourite): Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
quoted from here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3

Even a badly designed website (which MyRealPage websites are not) with a semblance of navigation and "reachability" for its pages will rank well if the content is good and relevant: I see these all the time in my searches. But, of course, it's easy to blame someone else (again, on an odd chance that this blame is genuine and made by a real customer).

You are welcome to read my bigger post on some of the technology-related inaccuracies (including this blog) regarding MyRealPage and Ubertor that have unfortunately gone for far too long unchallenged.

http://myrealpage-alias604.blogspot.com/2008/11/myrealpage-vs-ubertor-let-talk.html

To: wwtddn, so it appears that you have never heard of Ubertor until now, eh? :) What's interesting is that your example of "your friend" John McGregor points to http://whistlerblackcomb.info which is the same site used by Ubertor in their claims against MyRealPage here:

http://www.seorealtorwebsites.myubertor.com/MyRealPage.ubr

(Go to the very bottom to read the Disclaimer in that page, it states that the comparison is done against http://whistlerblackcomb.info)

Quite a coincidence for someone that was oblivious of Ubertor until now, isn't it? Just wish you didn't have to use such under-handed techniques.

"Farce", "supportive community": what a blow to Ubertor credibility to resort to this sort of tactic! How can anyone trust anything they post!

I hope at least my reply to your "concerns" was not in vain for people reading this. Pass regards to everyone at Ubertor for me :)

I didn't see any REAL Realtor leaving positive comments about Ubertor as well :) just your stool pigeon. Perhaps if you ask all your 24 team members to pretend that they are realtors and leave here more comments how MyRealPage "a little sucks" you can prove to yourself that your product is better :) But who are you trying to kid?

Please read my expose of wwtddn and his connection to Ubertor in my Blog: Ubertor: Anatomy of a Lie. Further, if you have doubts, read this post by "Tyler Deluert", posted here. It's not hard to see how the 2 posts, by wwtddn and "Tyler Dulert", are related: it's the same story. If wwtddn is with Ubertor, it follows that so is Tyler... Needless to say, Tyler is not a customer of MyRealPage.

Shameful!