swansonager – what is matt up to?

Over the last several weeks there has been much ado about idx indexing and Agent Genius has an excellent article that covers the history of the IDX indexing debacle with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS®, (MIBOR). This whole big mess is related to how Google operates in regard to Real Estate Listing Content that is sydicated via the IDX system and pulled into the Google SERP.

Scraping v. Indexing

It seems that the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS®, (MIBOR), has issued cease and desist letters to some brokers for their various IDX powered sites, or they would cut their feeds of data.

Why you ask?

All because Google is indexing the content of the pages and including them in their SERP. Really Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS®? Scraping and Indexing are two completely different animals. Here’s how I see it:

Scraping = Bad; Stealing and republishing as ‘your own’ as plagiarized content. If you still aren’t sure what this means, take a look at Jonathan’s site over at Plagiarism Today – he nails it. Otherwise, here’s another def “A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.[1] No part of a scraper site is original.

Indexing = Good; Crawling your site so others can find your site via a search engine – or otherwise defined as “a Search engine indexes, collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval.” that can be viewed through sites like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!

MIBOR is accusing that the agents’ IDX based websites are violating this section:

Section 15.2.2 – participants must protect IDX information from misappropriation by employing reasonable efforts to monitor and prevent “scraping” or other unauthorized accessing, reproduction, or use of the BLC database

But really, come on – Google is merely indexing a portion of the site to show on the SERP. If Google was taking their data and building out a full blown site with all the data like a scraper site, then that, imo, would be a violation of this section. What’s crazy is this interpretation is fully supported by the National Association of REALTORS®.

Google and other search engines benefit websites – doesn’t the National Association of REALTORS® get that? If you took search engines out of the equation, I’d venture to say that all locale based IDX websites would drop their traffic by 40%. At the end of the day, it’s all about listing exposure and driving buyers to the view the property listings.

That’s the most important thing – the more I think about this, why is this even an issue? Hopefully, they will come to a decision soon and thousands of unsuspecting real estate agents that run IDX websites won’t get a national smackdown from the National Association of REALTORS® if they take it that far by shutting down their IDX data feeds.

Ever thought the time was ripe to build out an open access national MLS based system that’s universal with full API support for everyone? The time is now. I’m sure game.

Other bloggers covering the IDX Indexing Issue

Agent Genius – Did Google Scrape My Website? You Be The Judge
Inman – Much ado over IDX indexing
Real Town – Will you have to pull IDX listings? That’s how NAR IDX policy is interpreted lately.
Realtor.org – NAR’s IDX Rule Changes Need More Study
Geek Estate Blog – SEO Tips for Listing Agents