We’ve had a new thing happening, especially on our Montreal rentals page. Several property management companies in Montreal have obviously hired people overseas to try to promote their sites and businesses. I see these overseas folks trying to list multiple “properties” on our site every day, but they, I am sure, aren’t “real” listings in many cases – just duplicate ‘generic’ apartment listings with an e-mail address (and an attempt to post a link) – surely for the sole purpose of boosting their websites that they were hired to help. These listings often come in waves of duplicates (having been listed many times before – or attempted to).
I’ve stopped posting many of these ads -(our site is human edited, so each ad has to go through an approval first, before it appears on our site). The reason is – I believe that many of the search engines out there are sensitive to duplicate content, and I think our rankings declined somewhat because of it – since I have stopped doing this, it seems as if they are climbing back a bit. We’ll see what happens. I also think it is a bad user experience to have the same ad appear over and over, when it is obviously a “dummy” ad placed just for the link.
Montreal is the page where this is happening the most – we’ll see if it starts happening elsewhere, but in the meantime, we’re trying to limit how much of this happens on our site.