ActiveRain, the blog network Trulia acquired as part of its Market Leader Inc. purchase last year, will now live on Trulia’s Web domain, sharing search engine optimization benefits and contributing to the portal’s overall Web traffic.
Today more than 3 million blogs by 250,000-plus agents are being moved to an ActiveRain subdomain on Trulia’s Web address, meaning that ActiveRain content will live on an address beginning with “activerain.trulia.com” instead of “activerain.com.”
The move will help Trulia and the blogs’ SEO and contribute to the portal’s monthly Web traffic totals, which numbered over 35 million unique visitors in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to Trulia. ActiveRain has not released its Web traffic numbers.
“(The endeavor) is about bringing ActiveRain content closer to users on Trulia,” Trulia spokesman Matt Flegal told Inman News.
ActiveRain, which updated its profile format and SEO performance in February, notified its community that the Web domain shift should help both the SEO of ActiveRain blog posts and won’t noticeably change the way they look or work.
For example, users who fill out contact forms that live on ActiveRain blogs will still go back to the blogger and remain untouched by Trulia and, other than the “trulia” name in the URL, no link to Trulia will appear on the posts other than as a link in the footer of the page.
Bob Stewart, ActiveRain community evangelist, and Kerrie La Guardia, ActiveRain community manager, introduce some of the changes with the Trulia-ActiveRain integration.
ActiveRain stressed that site content will remain independent of Trulia content. Ads for other agents, for example, will not appear on blog posts, and Trulia will not capture leads from the posts. Links from blog posts will include “follow” tags and contribute positively to the linked sites’ search engine rankings.
Users can also create ActiveRain blogs that don’t have Trulia in the domain name if they have a “RainMaker” account on the network and retain ownership of the content. Trulia maintains the right to republish ActiveRain content on sites like Real Trends and Inman News (Inman News began republishing select ActiveRain posts in November.)
Trulia maintains its own agent advice content at Trulia Voices, but the sites will not be integrating that content with ActiveRain as of now, ActiveRain noted. However, Trulia will be highlighting links to ActiveRain content on its Trulia Q&A pages.
In response to the news, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff tweeted yesterday that he will now be deleting his ActiveRain blog. His last post was on Oct. 17.