Would Google give the near duplicate content little or no juice? Yep.

Will adding a lot of near duplicates dilute the first adopter's juice? Probably.

Will Google allow several pages all with very similar content to all rank well for “123 Oak St”? Probably not.

Cool plug-in. It'll be fun to watch how it plays out.

My best guess is that there will be some strong sites that can do very well in a broad sense right of the bat by taking advantage of the existing power of the site and clean structure. The difficulty over time for these sites may be trying to compete with very active niche (geographic or other) sites with people that are very active in producing compelling content.

For the little guy I think there is a real opportunity to focus on a small area of real expertise and use the relevant listings as one of the types of content offered to visitors.

Feels like an opportunity to dominate some neighborhoods/areas with very strong landing pages. In my experience listings offer an excellent opportunity to facilitate registration. and registration allows me to always have a pool of people to prospect and that's good!

If I were google…I would do everything I could to refer the expert and when everyone has the listings it will probably be the surrounding content that helps google decide.

This made me very happy.

I was curious about duplicate content so I analyzed the pages of all major competitors – after all, we all did have the same listing content and they were “authority” websites. Why were we crushing them? What was the difference?

That was easy to discover.

Our next step was to create a plugin that would take a keyword, for example “homes” and optimize the entire internal structure of the site automatically for SEO – think all tags, descriptions, internal linking, etc…optimizing for the name of the town + homes and boosting the value of similar pages.

Ok, that's as much as I'm giving away : ) except to say that we also have a way of adding non-duplicate keyword rich content that changes whenever the spiders visit. (This is especially important when we put up different sites in the same market.)

My partners and I are debating whether to enter the IDX playing field, or just keep our secrets for our own partners to dominate individual markets by optimizing a number of sites this way (yes, yes, on different server farms w/different ip addresses) and monopolizing the PPC space by running ads to those sites as well (all owned of course by different corporations with different credit cards, etc…)

The hilarious thing is that I'm not an SEO professional at all. I just read what a lot of people have said about “best practices” and then just tested the effects of each strategy as much as I could, and then used the wordpress plugin structure to do each one automatically but with flexibility to allow more testing and the use of different strategies by different agents. (I was really tired of SEO guys I knew 'speculating' with no data to back what they said up.)

Oh, @ United Realty of Texas, you want as many pages as possible indexed not only for visitors but because they can all link to your home page or other page you may want to optimize. When the listing “expires” but if it's still indexed by google, it's pretty easy to have a click to that page automatically redirect the visitor to another one. The secret here though is to first try and get the “Results” pages indexed. When this kind of page is indexed, the link will usually define a specific set of property criteria, so even when some listings disappear, new ones take their place. If the other SEO factors are in place, I think Google likes new content above all else.

Whoops. I shut up now.

Cheers!