SEO for Real Estate Portals: Listing Pages, Schema & Long-Tail at Scale

Real estate SEO is a programmatic problem. The portals that win — Zillow, Bproperty, Bikroy Property — solved indexation, listing schema, and faceted-nav cannibalization. The ones that lose published 50,000 thin listing pages and watched Google deindex them all in a single core update.

Table of contents

1. Why most listing pages don't rank · 2. The minimum content threshold per listing · 3. RealEstateListing + Place schema done right · 4. Faceted navigation: index, noindex, or canonical? · 5. Internal linking at portal scale · 6. Long-tail neighborhood pages that compound · 7. FAQ

Why most listing pages don't rank?

Most real estate listing pages fail because they are near-duplicates: same template, similar photos, almost-identical descriptions. Google's helpful-content systems classify them as low-quality bulk pages and drop them from the index. The portals that rank treat each listing as a content asset — neighborhood context, transit data, school proximity, price history — not just a price + bedroom count.

The minimum content threshold per listing

Working baseline in 2026: 250+ unique words of human-or-AI-edited description, 6+ original photos with descriptive filenames and alt text, embedded map, walk score / transit score, school catchment, recent comparable sales, and price history. **Listings under 150 words of unique copy are deindexed within 30 days at portal scale.** This isn't a hypothetical — it's the recurring pattern in every real-estate site audit.

RealEstateListing + Place schema done right

Use schema.org's RealEstateListing (in v15+) with Place geo coordinates, floorSize in QuantitativeValue, numberOfRooms, price, priceCurrency and availability. Pair with Product/Offer for currency and price-drop signals. Add BreadcrumbList for the city › neighborhood › listing path. Validate via Google's Rich Results test — listing carousels appear for sites with clean, complete schema.

Faceted navigation: index, noindex, or canonical?

Index the high-volume facets that map to real search intent (city + property type + bedrooms). Noindex+follow the long-tail combinations (city + bedrooms + price + 3 amenities). Canonical multi-sort variations of the same result set to a single URL. **The single biggest crawl-budget waste on portal sites is leaving every facet combination indexable** — clean it up and index size drops 70% with no traffic loss.

Internal linking at portal scale

Use a hub-and-spoke model: city hub → neighborhood hubs → property type hubs → individual listings. Cross-link related listings ('similar properties in this neighborhood') and price-tier links ('homes under X taka in this area'). Avoid sitewide footer link dumps — Google's link-graph quality signals discount them sharply since 2023.

Long-tail neighborhood pages that compound

Neighborhood pages are the highest-EV asset on a real estate portal. A page like '/dhaka/gulshan-1/' with original neighborhood writeup, average price/sqft, recent transactions, schools, transit and 50 active listings ranks for hundreds of long-tail queries and feeds AI engines that cite it as the canonical source for that neighborhood.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many listings can I publish before triggering thin-content flags?

There's no fixed cap — quality per page is what matters. Sites with 5,000 high-quality listing pages outrank competitors with 200,000 thin ones. The threshold is per-page uniqueness and value, not total count.

Should expired listings 404, redirect, or stay live?

Best practice in 2026: keep them live with a clear 'sold' or 'rented' status, RealEstateListing.availability='Discontinued', and an internal link to similar active listings. This preserves backlinks and price-history value while signaling intent honestly.

Do AI engines cite real estate portal pages?

Yes — for neighborhood-level queries ('best areas in Dhaka for families'), but rarely for individual listings. The strategic implication is to invest disproportionately in editorial neighborhood content, not just listing volume.

What's the right URL structure for a multi-city portal?

/{city}/{neighborhood}/{property-type}/{listing-id}-{slug} — readable, breadcrumb-friendly, and stable across rentals/sales by adding /rent/ or /sale/ as the property-type segment. Avoid query-string-only listing URLs.

How do I handle duplicate listings across agents?

Designate a canonical version (usually the first or the one with most complete data) and use rel=canonical from duplicates. Better: deduplicate at ingestion using address + price + agent fingerprint and merge into a single listing with multi-agent contact options.