The IDX Search Results Integration Problem

The IDX website plug-ins utilized in most WordPress and other websites rely on on IFramed content from a third party IDX vendor to present searches and search results. This is not SEO friendly, since the search results are hosted at the vendor’s website, and the search engines do not see that content as belonging to the agent’s website at all.

In a fully integrated IDX solution, search forms, paginated search results and IDX details pages are not only seen by the search engines as belonging to the agent’s website, but the paginated search results for a specific set of search criteria can also be tightly integrated into a web page that has other content by use of “snippets”.  The UIDX product is a hybrid of this, in which the search form, search results and IDX details pages are seen as agent site content, but paginated search results cannot be integrated into other page content. So another solution must be implemented to accomplish similar results.

The IDX Search Integration Solution

The sample page associated with this post (see below) demonstrates how a static file of UIDX search results can be included in a WordPress page or post. This enhances SEO by including summaries for multiple listings with url links to the details pages for each listing, all of which are seen by the search engines as static content, and this adds significant indexable content to the page or post.

The UIDX search results are re-created once each day from the most recent IDX data, utilizing a collection of search parameters driving a proprietary special utility and cron job developed by the UIDX programmers. This tool was originally developed for my main Joomla website, and is now available for WP based websites as well. The process executes a search with the specified parameters, and returns the most recent 25 or other specified number of the most recently added listings into a static html file stored in a parameter specified location on the agent’s website. The html file is fully encoded with all css styles required for that website, as well as the listing data, so no additional WordPress or IDX processing is required.

Advantages of a Hybrid IDX Integration Approach

One of the differences between this approach and that of some totally integrated IDX solutions, which could be viewed either as an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, is that since this approach only includes a limited number of search results (I use 25 on my site) on the post or page, with no links to additional sub-pages of results for the same search criteria, it does not create as many search result sub-pages, and therefore not as many internal links to the IDX details pages. However, since additional search results sub-pages in other integrated IDX products generally contain the same or similar Title and Description tags as the first/primary results page, which could be viewed as duplicates by Google and the other search engines, and this technique does not do that, I believe that this approach may actually be better, from a SEO standpoint. In addition, creating UIDX search urls for the same search criteria, and including that link on the main search results page, accomplishes the same result, without the risk and impact of duplicating the main page’s Title and Description tags.

IDX Search Results Integration Plug-In

This technique also requires and uses a special WordPress plugin: “Include It“, which allows any kind of file, html, php, etc., to be easily included in any WordPress post or page.

The “Include It” trigger code:

The results: Click Here to see Sample Page