10+ Things to Know about MyRealPage Real Estate Websites and Listings

In case you are researching what provider to choose for your new Real Estate Website, or wondering if you are getting a good value for your money from your current one, you may be interested in the abbreviated "shopping list" of features that you get from MyRealPage' Real Estate Website and Listing package.

MyRealPage currently doesn't have a "tiered" product structure, so all the features below are included at no additional cost in your standard subscription package:

Listings

• You can manage for free Unlimited number of Active or Sold Listings; (in fact all your listings including old expired ones are available to you).
• All your listings are Automatically Imported without the need to enter them again (or pay anyone to do it), we import full listing information from the Real Estate Board and all your listings come complete with photos and full information, just as they were entered into the Real Estate Board database. Your Office Listings are also Automatically Imported. Of course you can add more and better photos or add more information.
• Give your visitors free full anonymous listing searches (Reciprocity program) with 4 different search forms, including an innovate Google Map Search which allows your clients to draw their search on the map as rectangles, circles or free-form shapes, or select from a prepackaged neighbourhood overlays, right on the Google Map. See a sample video here.
• Free Full Virtual Office Website (VOW) support (not just a password-protected Reciprocity search) , including New Lead Sign-Up, Automatic Email Notification for your VOW clients of new listings, price changes, status changes, etc; the ability for your VOW clients to Save any number of Searches, as well as mark listings as Favourites and more. All VOW listings are shown without delay (as is the case with mls.ca/realtor.ca and realtylink.org); and with their full details.
• Free Automatic blogs about your New Listings, Sold Listings, and Open Houses; including the listing photos and the ability to modify the templates on which these blogs are based to give you the ultimate flexibility and differentiation (Watch a demo video here).
• All our listings include Free Photo Gallery, Inquiry Form, Send a Friend Form, Google Map location, Mortgage Calculator.
• Free Unlimited number of Pre-Defined Searches which you can create based on any available search form. You can also connect these Pre-Defined Searches to a Domain name, like "high-end-downtown-condos.com", for example (See a domain demo video here).
  
• Free Unlimited Pre-Defined Search Forms. Customize and save any available listing search form to display to your web visitors the settings which best reflect your specialty and the geographic area where you specialize; for example, pre-select White Rock Houses in a specific price range and make that form your default Reciprocity form.
  
• Enjoy full access to Free Detailed Listing Web Access Statistics. See Listing Statistics Product Release.
• Multiple great looking templates to choose from for both list and detail views: large photo centric, information-centric, short, Google Map centric, thumbnail, etc. You can choose which templates appear where.
• Great inline form support: never leave the page you are on to submit a form: all are done in the same page with great animation effects.
• 5 diffetent photo galleries to choose from to do your photo and movie presentation
• Integrated Lightbox effect for large images that allows you to showcase large images in their original resolution.
• Full support for embedded and uploaded videos; great image support that allows you to use both custom ("manual") images and automatically imported ones from the Real Estate Boards' databases.
• Custom listing banners, such as "Immaculate", "New Price", etc. that will run across the listing images to draw better attention.
• Integrated Walk-Score and Google Earth; all listings are automatically positioned
• Craigslist integration: post multiple listings with just a few clicks: no copy-and-paste for each individual listings; great looking, image-rich posts.
• iPhone and Android (google phone) support: full geo-location aware application that shows listings in your current vicinity, including support for VOW login, signup, integrated telphone calling and texting from the listing page; the application can follow as you move and update found listings
• Full custom listing CSS support
• Listing widget support: take all your Listings, IDX (Searches), Predefined Searches and Predefined Forms and embed them into any other website, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Point2Agent, or any other website, just like you would embed a YouTube video. Your listings widgets can even auto-box themselves when someone accesses your listings from email notifications. No more framing and ugly double-scrollbars, etc.

Website

• Free Unlimited Pages: have as many as you like on your website.
• Free Master Template support: put things you would like to see on all your pages there. Override any page to be different.
• Free Full CSS support, including separate CSS for your Master Template and CSS for each individual page for superior customizability (watch a demo video here).
• Many free "Hot-Swappable" Themes to choose from: make your website look as different as you desire, or create an entirely different look and feel with our Website Tools. Watch a quick demo video here.
• What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) Website Page Editor which allows you to edit your Layout and Content on any Page or Master Template (What a "Power" demo video of what you can do).
• Weblet-based Page Composition: your pages are comprised of a number of small building blocks, called "weblets", such as News Feed, Featured Listing, Home Evalution Form, Custom Form, Quick Listing Search, Become a Member Form, Login Form, Navigation Menu, Jump Links, etc. All these weblets are available to you (no "locking/unlocking"). These weblets can be dragged-and-dropped anywhere on the page, including the template sections, so you can customize your pages to exactly what you would like them to look like. We have dozens of these weblets to choose from and mix-and-match.
• Edit-Publish-Recover Website Editing Pattern. You are free to experiment with new pages, changes to your templates and look and feel: all without your visitors seeing these changes. When you are ready, hit the "Publish All" button. And we've got your back even if you discover mistakes after publishing: browse your saved page in the Website History and recover the information you want.
• Free Cutomizable Flash Banners: many of our themes include flash banners which are fully customizable, including the ability to upload custom images and even flash movies to make your banner stand out. Don't like flash? No problem, put a static image in palce of the flash banner.
• Freely Use, Adapt, Customize a number of Pre-Built Forms, or build Forms From Scratch, including validating emails, required fields, etc.
• Free Password protection of any page or document or image on your website with a simple checkbox
• Free Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enhancements:
• Free Automatic Sitemap.xml and sitemap generation, including the ability to upload a custom sitemap.xml file or modify your sitemap page.
• Free Automatic robots.txt generation, including the ability to upload a custom robots.txt file
• Free Automatic inclusion of your Website Title and Subtitle in all your pages
• Full access to Title, Description, Keywords and any Custom Meta Tags. If you provide these custom metatags or keywords on your Master Template, all your pages will automatically include them. (Watch a demo video here)
• Text-only enhanced browsing: we duplicate important information and links in noscript tags and other appropriate places, if this important information may appear concealed in text-only browsing. We want search engines to see everything.
• All Listings, Listing Searches and Listing forms can be accessed with a human readable URL (link) which can even be manually modified (watch a demo video here).
• We make sure our websites comply with the Google Webmaster Guidelines and are highly usable for your web visitors.
• Free Full Blogging support, including the ability to embed photos, videos or other rich media (watch a demo video here). All MyRealPage blogs include Comment Forms which you are free to disable. You are also in control to authorize comments to prevent manual spam (automatic spam is prevented via special image verification code - CAPTCHA). All blogs include RSS Feed so they are easily integrated with FeedBurner (or Facebook Notes, or other) or TwitterFeed to propagate your blogs to blog aggregation services, your twitter account, social networks, etc.
• Free Unlimited number of Blogs, Unlimited Blogs Posts which you can spread on Unlimited number of pages on your website. Hence, you can have a blog automatically created for your listings show up on a dedicated page; and you can create a separate page per blog on a distinct subject so that your blogs are not all jumbled together. Also, you can even have your News Feed weblet show a "preview" of any or all your blogs on the front page...
• Integrated image resizing, cropping and editing. The system also autodetects large images and scales them for you automatically, if you allow.
• Create artibrary list-based pages, such as, "Tips and Tricks", "Recipes", etc. and then cross-publish them on other pages on your website by creating "Featured Tip", or "Featured Recipe".
• Create featured listing from your Predefined Searches: you will be able to feature listings that you didn't list.
• Publish your Twitter Feed, Friend Feed, or any other RSS feed on your website.
• Full Custom Template support: have a designer create, test and package a custom, hand-rolled HTML template for your site. This template can be easily uploaded and applied to your Master Template on the website or any other page. Even after the Custom Template is applied, you can still manage your own layout and content (weblets) just like you did before the Custom Template.

We treat our websites not only as a platform for you to publish information, but also as "tools" for your visitors, where they can do listing searches, research, organize their finds, etc. All of this makes our websites "sticky" for your leads: they have a reason to return and sign up with you.

Lead Management

• Enjoy a Free Fully Featured Lead Manager in MyRealPage Private Office. Have all your clients' information at your fingure tips, including the ability to enable/disable their "services", such as access to Virtual Office Website.
• View your VOW clients' Email Listing Notification History, view their Favourites to better understand how your clients requirements change or where their preferences lie. Track your clients' Saved Searches in the VOW.
• Import/Export your Contacts to and from popular mail programs, such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, or a custom comma/tab delimited format.
• Send an email or view email communication with a Contact right from your Contact/Lead Manager.
• Synchronize your MyRealPage Contacts in Private Office and Webmail with Outlook, as well as mobile devices, such as Palm, Windows Mobile, etc (at the time of this writing this product is in the final stages of being released into a public beta)

Brokers

There are too many product features to list here; please contact our sales at sales@myrealpage.com. At a glance though, expect:

• Agent Directory with web integration
  
• Instant Websites for your agents based on a number of templates fully under your control
  
• Instant access to Listings, VOW and Contacts/Leads for your agents
  
• Feature Agent support, with the ability to delegate all communication to them, as well as delegate leads
  
• Intranet Website support, password protected for your agents. Have a protected website just for your office with all the features of a regular MyRealPage website.
  

Ok, so maybe it's more like 30+ things you need to know, but it's hard to stop... Of course, the above is far from complete and doesn't include many, many other features. Again, remember all the above features and many others not mentioned here are included in your standard package at no extra charge: enjoy! :).

You should also know that if you sign up through our corporate website you will not require any contract and will be billed month-to-month. The setup fee entitles you to a fairly complete training session; and as our sales people tell me, it's getting longer and longer :).

If you have concerns that are technology related or you would like to get clarification on how we support a particular technical feature, drop us a line at tech-answers@myrealpage.com. You may also be interested in my "MyRealPage vs Ubertor: Facts and Fiction" post which addresses the inaccuracies in technical claims made by Ubertor, our competitor in Greater Vancouver area.

You may also be interested in our Product Tour on the MyRealPage Corporate Website.

Ubertor: Anatomy of a Lie

The readers of my other blog post on MyRealPage vs Ubertor: Facts and Fiction will have seen the reference to this Blog by Ian Watt.

In the comments following this video, there is a long and angry posting by "wwtddn", a supposedly disgruntled customer of MyRealPage. The poster chose to be relatively anonymous ("I am a Vancouver Realtor specializing in Duplexes. I am consider myself an avid user of the internet and used to be a novice webmaster": according to his profile). I will not quote the whole posting, as it's available online in the Blog link above. "wwtddn" claims that MyRealPage destroyed his website's search rank and "tanked" his leads. "wwtddn" continues to incriminate our sales person in Vancouver by claiming that he made big promisses and then avoided calls when "wwtddn" needed answers. Then, he posts this, which I will quote in its entirety, as it's important to this expose:

"Ian thanks for the headup about Ubertor. 

I just Googled your name "Ian Watt" and saw your site came up first and had a fancy site menu below it; just like Microsoft. Your site also have a nice description with the link in Google.

Just to compare; I looked for a colleagues site still on myRealFarse and googled them... "John McGregor" and got nothing, so I added "whistler" and googled "John McGregor Whistler" and found the link to their site buried down the page with no professional menu and their description talked about myRealPage instead of them! "Check myRealPage.com Mail - Download myRealPage.com Private Office."

Ray; you'll know who I am as soon as I cancel. I dont trust you to keep my site up till I leave; cause of your mandatory contract! I know understand why you locked me in to a contract!

Sincerely,

Good Riddens

ps. Beware of MyRealPage ... there is a reason they make you sign a minimum of a one year contract."

I initially posted my response in good faith that this person's concerns were real (even though I had doubts). Then, afterwards, I was reading the following posting by Ubertor (also referred to in my other blog): 

http://www.seorealtorwebsites.myubertor.com/MyRealPage.ubr

As I was scanning it, towards the bottom something caught my eye: a blurry graphic of a screenshot of one of our clients' website which was used in that post. I couldn't quite read the name but it looked very much like "John McGregor". I followed the link to his website mentioned at the bottom of that page in the "Disclaimer". Sure enough, that was him. Hm, I thought, this rings a bell, I think I have seen it somewhere! Sure enough, it was in "wwtddn" posting on Ian Watt's blog; it was wwtddn's "colleague"! So, a person that claimed to be a disgruntled customer of MyRealPage and oblivious of Ubertor (even as he is an avid user of the internet and a novice webmaster) ended up using the very same website in his criticism as did Ubertor in theirs over a year ago... Need I go any further?!

This was a bit of a shake-up for me. I have composed my previous blog on MyRealPage vs Ubertor: Facts and Fiction in good faith inviting an open exchange. I never actually realized how dirty of a game Ubertor plays online. It appears as though they are treating online searches as their little playground, by employing legitimate-looking posts, in order to sway a reader, looking for an objective opinion, into thinking that there is a large and vibrant community support for their company and an equally bad faith towards MyRealPage. Anonymous virulent bad-mouthing of the competition and outright lies (and even libel against real people, like our sales person in Vancouver)? How many of the praises and adulations posted for Ubertor are by real realtors "from the wild", as opposed to customer friends. There is nothing wrong showing your support for friends, but to someone looking for a balanced story and objective opinion I would say: beware! you can't trust anything you see regarding Ubertor in online discussions.

What also saddens me is that this company actively promotes itself in SEO business. Like many techies, I have always held deep respect for Google and other search engines for organizing the information on the internet by relevance, so people find what they are looking for; so it doesn't degenerate into a spam-overrun mayhem,  as it happened prior to Google. And so, to see an SEO company employing these sorts of tactics makes me ask: How ethical are they in their SEO work for their clients, if they resort to these tactics in promoting them-very-selves! I hope Google's spam group catches up to this.

In a way, there is a positive element in this for MyRealPage: we must be really making Ubertor worried! Our sales numbers show that. Maybe we are doing something right, even if an online researcher can't discover that easily because of all the "noise". Well, we'll continue to compete by improving our products and giving our clients more value.

UPDATE: I further found this link:

http://www.aboutus.org/MyreAlpage.com

Read the comment posted by "Tyler Deluert". Doesn't it sound like wwtddn? Needless to say, he is not MyRealPage customer. Shameful!

MyRealPage vs Ubertor: Facts and Fiction

Hello, my name is Bill Skrypnyk and I am the Technical Director at myRealPage.com.

I usually find myself too busy to publish personal blogs, but I have decided that it's important enough this time. I have been increasingly bothered lately by the incorrect information regarding technological capabilities of myRealPage.com that has become widespread online by Ubertor, our competitor in Greater Vancouver area.

In particular I am going to comment regarding primarily these posts:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/ianwatt/videos/95/

http://www.seorealtorwebsites.myubertor.com/MyRealPage.ubr

I would like to state outright: I don't care about claims of who the "leader" or "innovator" is; I will leave that to the marketing and sales to fight out. I do care, however, when claims of technical nature are made; or when implications are made that MyRealPage's website or listing product is inferior in some way. At the very least, I think I owe this to our existing customers and to those that are looking for a balanced story. Also, this post is not a "plug" for MyRealPage to get signups; this is NOT marketing material and I am not advertising any specials or promotions.

So, I am here to set the record straight and I invite comments and discussion. The way I see it, it's long overdue. Enough intro...

Regarding Ian Watt's video blog: I have to say, Ian, congratulations on a nice blogging methodology: I do like the intimate "pro-to-pro" feel of the "drive-and-speak" medium! I wish, however, the "content" lived up to its "form". 

Let's take it one at a time (in no particular order and combining all sources above):

Claim: MyRealPage has bad Sitemaps (Ubertor has been promoting this myth for some time now)
Fact: It seems that in the SEO rush, people forget what sitemap is for. Sitemap should be an easy textual organization of links to relevant, useful sections of your website. It is not intended to be designed for search bots: sitemap.xml is designed for that. Sitemaps are designed for humans. Google Webmaster Guidelines warns against that. 

Of course, don't take my word for it! Please read the link that follows (it's 3rd from the top when you google "Google Webmaster Guidelines". Also feel free to go to Guidelines directly):

http://www.feedthebot.com/sitemaps.html

It's a simple and accessible explanation of why you shouldn't include every page on your website in your sitemap (contrary to what Ubertor tells you). You have to see that sitemap is valuable to a search bot because it represents a "normalized", no-frills view of what's there. But the important point is that your pages need to be reachable from, not necessarily listed in your sitemap. Google Webmaster Guidelines suggest that you shouldn't display more than 100 links on your sitemaps, and if you want to display more, then break up the sitemap into more pages (I have never seen a paginated Ubertor sitemap)

Ian, take a look at your sitemap. Any Ubertor website owner, please do same... Your sitemaps do not appear made for humans to read, they are just a concatenation of all possible links in your website. Someone may claim that they are Google-friendly, but the problem is no one quite knows what being "google-friendly" means; Google says, don't worry about making it google-friendly, make it user-friendly!

On that same subject, MyRealPage now includes links to all your listings from your Sitemap (paginated by 100). BTW, those links are also very human readable: they actually include the address in the URL, e.g.

website.com/1234-Main-Street-Vancouver-mylistings-1231.property

Claim: MyRealPage cannot do custom "css" (reference is vague, feel free to elaborate or correct)
Fact: That's a pretty low bar to set, really. I expect any website hosting and provisioning company would allow the end user to access CSS (cascading style sheets). Here is a short video showing CSS in MyRealPage website tools. This has always been there.

In addition, please note the following things about the way MyRealPage CSS is constructed:

• Your css additions are going to be appended to the end of all CSS, hence you can make any overrides
  


• You have the ability to override your "Master Template" which affects all pages; and you can override any individual page's css in addition to make it fully custom.
  


• The complete css for the website is constructed by the server and sent as one css file, thus saving on "round-trips" by the browser and provides an opportunity for aggressive compression

Claim: MyRealPage doesn't have "video" integration
Fact: Hm, this one made me pause, to be honest. What do you mean exactly here, Ian? Did you mean video integration in a MyRealPage website as in here, for example.

Nowadays, videos are embedded into websites via "copy-and-paste" object/embed flash references; or swfobject.js-driven flash (which in the end boils down to the same thing, in case anyone wonders). I can think of 3-4 different ways of doing it with MyRealPage. Not sure, if I am missing something here... Feel free to elaborate. (BTW, MyRealPage can also be thought to have "Google Calendar" integration, "Google Maps" integration, if I were to adopt this kind of attitude: the bottom line is that these integrations are too trivial to claim to be product features).

Claim: Ubertor has had blogs for 3 years and MyRealPage has just got them.
Fact: I assume it's true about Ubertor and their 3-year-old blogs. To be fair, MyRealPage has introduced blogging over a year and a half ago, not "just now" (incidentally, we have finished our completely re-engineered websites system only 2 years ago). So, one would assume that Ubertor would be pretty far ahead of MyRealPage in terms of blogging functionality and features. Since I don't know what exactly the features with Ubertor are, and I don't want to trust sales and marketing on that, I am going to shoot in the dark and invite responses and corrections.

Ian, I had gone to your website and viewed your blogs. Again, congratulations of very active and prolific writing: you definitely take blogging seriously! But here are my questions:

• I didn't see a means for anyone to post comments to your blogs. I thought that was one of the main attractions about blogging: not just to be heard but to also invite feedback, to engage an audience.
  


• Perhaps, you simply disabled the comments; but then I couldn't see it on other websites by Ubertor, so perhaps others did that too. I will assume that this is the case;
  


• Then, can you filter the comments, to avoid manual spam posting about "rolex watches", etc? How does Ubertor let you do that? Do you need to monitor pending comments? Are  you notified by email?
  


• Can you configure "ping-backs" to well-known blog aggregators (or custom ones) that understand blog pings? (I mean without someone setting up a script on the Ubertor's back-end)
  


• Also, do you have free-of-charge access to multiple unlimited blogs, making unlimited number of posts, and spreading these blogs on unlimited number of pages on your website?
  


• I have seen automatic listing blogs on your web pages. Do you have access to editing the templates that produce these blog postings. So that your postings don't have the same text as all the other Ubertor websites, if you wanted to be different? Can you edit these templates yourself?

Now, I expect (hope) that many of the questions above would be answered "yes"! (Of course, it's all "yes" for MyRealPage). But I wonder if all or how many are? Do you have questions, like "but can you do ... this ... with YOUR blogs?" I will be happy to entertain those questions! Perhaps, there may be some good ideas there for us too!

Claim: This one is a general attitude, that Ubertor websites are more flexible
Fact: Oh boy... This is a big one and can take chapters. Instead, I am going to post here a "power" video about some of our website capabilities and let others decide... Here is the video outlining some of the many feature our users can take advantage of.

A note about flexibility: it's not enough to have "theoretical" flexibility in the sense of "hey, yeah we can change these files for you on the server". These sorts of hacks involve custom orders, which means the customer is out of money... I will not make a claim here that this is the way Ubertor extends their websites, because I simply don't know (this was certainly true for MyRealPage old website product). But I would be happy to hear feedback!

MyRealPage's notion of flexibility is that all the tools and power should be in the hands of the customer. If they want to go to town, they are free to do so. If they employ outside design or technical help: even better! We have used the exact same WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) tools which we have built and which we offer our clients, in order to build our own themes in the first place; and we also built our corporate website with them. We eat what we cook! BTW, we also use our own blog product on our corporate site: if we think it's good for our customers, it should be good for us too, no? (Does Ubertor? [added: No!])

Claim: MyRealPage uses Flash, search engines can't index Flash, etc.
Fact: Yes, MyRealPage does use Flash for page banners. However, and this is very important, Flash does NOT pre-empt regular markup in MyRealPage websites. You can compare our flash banners to just regular static images; in fact, you can choose to just use plain old images for your banners; and yes, you can do it yourself... If our flash banners include navigations, such as menus, our themes are careful to include additional, duplicate menus that are rendered via markup.

Along the way, I should disperse another false claim made by reachd that we employ "javascript" menus which are bad for search engines. I can only guess here that by "javascript" menus they mean that we render menus entirely out of javascript. That's incorrect. A simple text search in the "View Source" for our pages will prove that claim wrong; search for the menu titles and you will see them in plain markup. Javascript re-renders that markup into a more manageable interactive menus and that has no effect on menu's visibility to the search bots but vastly improves their usability on the website: we actually do care a lot about how our websites behave for real web visitors; not just search bots.

A little update too: Google can actually read text out of flash:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13530_3-9834708-28.html?tag=mncol;txt

But that doesn't change anything for MyRealPage; we never depended on that capability.

Claim: MyRealPage "frames" your listings and search engines can't see them.
Fact: True. MyRealPage does indeed employ iframe for displaying your listings, searches, etc. . However, you also need to consider the following facts:

1. MyRealPage listings are embedded in the page in a very tightly integrated way. There is hardly a way for a visitor to tell or be obstructed in their navigation of the listings. So it doesn't hurt your website's usability.
2. I imagine, that this is primarily brought up to point out that this is bad for content indexing and SEO. Yes, iframes are not good for relevance, not because they are not indexed (at least by Google), but because what's in them doesn't get related to the website where they are placed (even though, to be fair, once found individually on Google, the embedded iframe will re-frame itself into your website). MyRealPage has not initially intended to expose the listings which we get from various Real Estate Boards, including GVREB to be indexable (I think we may also need to clear legal issues there too). MyRealPage expects that listing oriented searches will be done via well known portals that are familiar to everyone: mls.ca or realtylink.org. If you include a link in your REB listing to your virtual tour or your website, the leads will land there and have access to complete information as it was entered into mlxchange. From there, MyRealPage provides a great means to make your website "sticky" for the lead: they can search listings via Reciprocity, an anonymous search, on par with mls.ca and realtylink, but using better search forms and your name as the contact person for every listing; or sign up by giving you their name and contact info and get access to Virtual Office Website (VOW). VOW allows them to get up-to-date search results without the 48 hour delay as happens with mls.ca and realtylink; and also save searches, mark favourites, be notified about changes in listing activity in their searches, etc... (Of course, you can monitor and track your leads activity: we have a great lead manager!) This will give them a reason to come back to your website, not just find it, and get the information that they are really looking for, i.e. ALL listing matching their criteria, not just yours.
3. In addition, the bottom line to the iframe story is that yes!, your listings are being included as part of your website now. Recently, MyRealPage has started publishing automatic blogs on all our customers' listing activity, including New Listings, Sold Listings and Open Houses (see http://www.myrealpage.com/blog.html?blogEntryId=10786) . Each such blog posting includes listing info and appears as part of the blog pages, and hence reachable and readable to search bots, so your listings are actually being indexed. You can opt-in or out of this feature as you wish. Of course, you can also configure your own template for these blogs, so they don't look like everyone else's.

Claim: MyRealPage title tags, meta tags, or take-your-pick-tags are bad
Fact: Title tags are important. From what I understand by listening to Google, they are especially important for visual presentation when your website shows up in search results. Apparently "Untitled" is the most popular title on the internet! Obviously, it's not a pleasant entry in search results for Google, and they are trying to fight that. The title shows up in search results and you want it to be descriptive. Let me make it clear: at MyRealPage you have full control over your title tags. You can put whatever you like there. Please watch this video about Page tags, title, etc. in MyRealPage web tools, so I can nail all these "tag" claims in one. The bottom line: all these tags are under your control!

So now, that you have fine-tuned all these tags, your website should start getting some rank, right? Wrong! Do you really imagine that you need to spoon-feed somebody like Google (or others) all these little quirky keyword snippets to get rank? Google hasn't gotten to where it is right now by relying its ranking on meta tags in which website owners self-promote their own relevancy. Let me say it though: page meta information is important and should be treated carefully and thoughtfully, but not because of Google, but rather because it is The Right Thing To Do and helps make the web more semantically structured and coherent. In very plain and simple terms: Google bases its rank on relevancy of the Supreme Ruler of Googledom: CONTENT. Google appreciates your help when you give it metadata, and you should continue to do so, but please stop believing that someone fixing your meta tags will fix your ranking. The person Google listens to the most is Google User, the person performing a search. If the visitors searching for content "walk away" from search results, it means they are not relevant, and Google scrambles. So please, if you want rank, write useful, interesting, insightful content first! Don't blame your website company, mine or others (Ubertor included of course) for losing your rank [Update: there was no single real complaint levelled at MyRealPage for losing anyones rank. There were fake ones, engineered by Ubertor, as discussed in my "Ubertor: Anatomy of a Lie" blog.]. If you want rank, please pay attention to your content. My and other companies in this space get you started with sample content but if you leave it unchanged, you have exactly zero chance of getting any rank. Google calls these websites "affiliate programs"; and in Google's view of the internet, these websites just clog the pipes because they produce no original content. If someone selling you a template-based website tells you otherwise, you should be very cautious with your trust.

Claim: You have to pay to switch MyRealPage theme
Fact: Completely wrong. See a short video about switching themes in MyRealPage website tools here. In fact, there are extremely few things that you would ever need to pay MyRealPage for in addition to your regular monthly rate. (Of course, if you want us to do custom design or other work for you, there is a charge, like everywhere else) Sometimes it feels like that chewing gum commercial where the execs are afraid that the longer lasting gum will kill production. Our products simply include everything. We currently don't have a tiered product structure (I can't make promises for the future of course). Back to themes: all our themes are HOT-SWAPPABLE. That's my personal pride and joy. You can experiment by swapping themes in and out and publish live when you are ready. You have access to all the themes for free. Of course, our themes are not just rebrands of one theme with different typefaces and colour. They are fully distinct, with different structures. The theme browser is available to you along with the other tools in your Website Management.

Claim: MyRealPage handles Page Not Found incorrectly
Fact: MyRealPage allows you to create your own policy on what happens when a page is not found. In many cases, people choose to redirect the page to the main page. You can create your own "notfound.html" and offer whatever you like on it.

Claim: (This is a non-technical one, and I may as well cover it...) MyRealPage employs contracts to cling to customers because our product "sucks" ("maybe just a little...": thanks Ian :)
Fact: All the sign-ups that go through our corporate website are contract-free, month-to-month: you can go to our corporate website and read the Terms and Conditions for yourself.

This exhausts my list of claims for now. But I would like to mention a couple more things.

I want MyRealPage to have your business: that's true. But I want it not because someone promised you the world just to sign you up, and certainly not if you feel you were taken advantage of. I want you to use MyRealPage products because I think they can go head-to-head with the best ones out there and win. I am not afraid of competition. I personally owe gratitude to Point2, RealPageMaker, Redman, and others for creating competitive technical challenges for MyRealPage to match and outperform.

I don't have internal access to Ubertor's administration interface. I have neither time nor spy skills to get this info. I don't have complete knowledge of their billing and tier structures and I don't want to rely on information discovered by marketing and sales. As I have said before, what I am interested in is technology. So I am inviting here tech talk. I am calling out to Ubertor's tech advocates: let's challenge ourselves here. Why don't you come out and level the "hey, but can you do ... this ... with MyRealPage, we can!" at us. I would be honoured to stand in our products' defense and level our challenges at you! What do we have to lose? Finding out bugs and strangenesses which I am sure both you and we will fix shortly upon discovery in such exchanges. Maybe we'll even be motivated to enhance our products based on these exchanges. The only winners will be our customers!

Your move, Ubertor...