Syndicate your listings – Setting up feeds

It’s great to have your own website but getting your listings marketed on the Internet should involve getting the word out to other websites. You can syndicate, or distribute, your listings to other sites with the Great Real Estate plugin, so that buyers will find your listings when they search Zillow or Google Real Estate, for example.

The plugin comes with four custom Listings feeds, and they are rather easy to set up. The development of the XML structure (to conform with the site specs) has already been done. However, if you need to make any tweaks, the feed templates can be modified just like any other template file.

Note: If you’re using WordPress 2.6, be sure to upgrade Feed Wrangler to the very latest version before you start!

Feed Summary

Google Base – delivers your available (for sale or for rent) listings to Google Base

Zillow - delivers all your listings to Zillow, including sold listings for Zillow’s “Virtual Sold Sign” feature.

Trulia – delivers all your listings to Trulia (provided you’re an agent or broker, they do not accept aggregator or FSBO feeds)

My Yahoo! and iGoogle - provides an RSS 2.0 “Media” feed for My Yahoo!, incorporating photos with your listings. This feed also works with Google’s iGoogle service.

Setting Up

First, copy the four feed-*.php files from the plugins/great-real-estate/copytotemplatedir folder to your current theme directory.

Then go to the Real Estate panel and click on the Settings tab. In the Feeds section enter the appropriate text for your site and business. These fields will be inserted into the XML feeds.

Then install and activate the Feed Wrangler plugin.

On Feed Wrangler’s Settings page. you’ll need to enter the “slug” for each of the feeds, plus a description if you like. The slug matches the part of the filename between feed- and .php. For example, use zillow as the slug for feed-zillow.php.

Enter each slug, and you’ll end up with a list of the four feeds with links to the actual feed.

Testing

If you have permalinks, you’ll want to test using the permalink structure. Meaning, don’t use the link on the Feed Wrangler screen, use the Permalink style URLs: /feed/zillow/, /feed/yahoomedia/, /feed/trulia/, and /feed/googlebase/. If you’re happy with what you see, you’re ready to deploy your feeds.

Test the Yahoo Media feed by adding the feed to your My Yahoo! account. This will also help to clue Yahoo! in to the existence of your feed. You can also add this feed to iGoogle, they support the RSS2.0/Media specification as well.

Tell the sites about your feeds

You’ll need to submit these feeds to each of the sites; follow the links above in the list of feeds. For My Yahoo! and iGoogle, you’ll need to grab one of their badges and add it, with a link, to an appropriate part of your site – such as the sidebar or footer. The other three feeds are really only going to matter to the sites they were designed for.

And remember, these are listings feeds, they don’t replace or affect your site’s default RSS feed.