MIBOR and NAR have no grasp of internet technology and how it works!

In a recent development, the MIBOR MLS (Indianapolis Board of Realtors) in Indiana, backed by an opinion of the National Association of REALTORS  (NAR) blocked use of an MLS feed embedded in a member agent website.  MIBOR maintained that the site broke MLS rules in allowing scraping of content by Google.  They also maintain that a Framed IDX is permissible while an embedded one is not. 

The fallacy in their thinking is two fold:

1. Google is caching the identical content of the site for indexing purposes, not for scraping.  To understand the concept of caching, please visit these two wikipedia articles -
   • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_cache
   • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache
2. The sites they think are not crawlable and indexable ( Framed IDX Solutions) are in fact crawlable, indexable, and scrapeable. This is evidenced by my own Framed IDX Solution provided by Listingware.com which is a well know IDX provider across the country.
   • My Google results for my Framed IDX Provider (there are 433 indexed) - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS305US305&q=site%3Acalcarter.listingware.com&btnG=Search
   • Another is here with over 1500 indexed - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS305US305&q=site%3Alauraallen.listingware.com&btnG=Search
   • A graphic created when I sent my own spider out to crawl my Listingware.com Framed IDX URL. The points on the graphic are actual pages on my Listingware Framed IDX URL and the lines are the links between the pages within the domain (they were limited to 1000, but there are many more.:
   • 

Now it appears that MIBOR is guilty of violating its own policy as can be evidenced by this Google Search of listings apparently fed from MIBOR to Listinghub: 

MIBOR Listing Details on Google

Google visits, caches, and indexes both Framed IDX and Embedded IDX’s.  The proof is above.

The quandry that NAR will find itself in when it wakes up to these facts is that if the embedded IDX’s are violating the rules, so are the framed solutions.  They must decide whether to rip apart an entire sector of the agent community, an entire industry of agent service providers, and also rob the public at large both buyers and sellers of relevant information for the benefit of a few that want to list properties, promote them poorly, get both sides of a deal and not have the buyers represented at all.

In summary, MIBOR and NAR do not know how the internet works and if they don’t want content cached by Google, they should never post it to the internet.

They must now decide - kill all feeds or permit all feeds!  It is that simple and the ignorance is bliss line won’t work. 

Ask yourself who benefits from killing all the feeds?  No one!

Other MIBOR / NAR Blog Posts of Interest:

• Did Google Scrape my website? The Catalyst!
• NAR response to Morgan Carey on MIBOR and Google

• If We Disconnected Every IDX Feed In Every City Across America, Would We have Your Complete Attention?

• FBS Blog
• MIBOR and NAR hurting their membership
• More Power to Trulia, Zillow, and REALTOR dot com

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Tagged as: Indianapolis Board of Realtors, internet technology, mibor, mls board, nar, National Association of Realtors