To answer the most common questions real estate site owners have asked about PropsmartCrawler, we have created the FAQ below. If any of your questions aren't answered, please contact us.
The PropsmartCrawler is Propsmart's real estate listing crawler. Propsmart.com is a real estate search engine. We're much like Google, only more focused and specific, in that our Crawler can interpret meta-data about property listings, such as price, number of bedrooms, address, etc. We collate and organize this data and provide our search as a free service to the public at www.propsmart.com. Our crawler will revisit your site every few days, and is throttled carefully so as to not affect your web server's performance.
No. Our business is providing a gateway to all the real estate listings on the Web. Propsmart is not a real estate brokerage. Our revenue comes from advertising and lead generation.
We provide our users with a preview of properties including up to 4 small images, price, number of beds and baths, square footage, etc., but we do not list the full MLS data or contact details of any property that we crawl. If any Propsmart user is interested enough in a property to contact you, they have to click on the "source" or "cache" (a version of your page we cache locally for our users' convenience) links to see the full information. We also include links to your home page with every one of your properties we list. We recommend that all our users visit the realty sites that are delivering the properties we list, and use that realty site's own search engine for maximum power and flexibility. We also recommend that our users patronize realtors and websites who are "Propsmart friendly" by allowing us to crawl and display their listings.
Please contact us to have your site removed, or to ask questions concerning load on your servers, copyright issues, quality of the results we are getting from your site, or anything else. Also, to prevent us or other responsible search engines from accessing your listings in the future, be sure to put in a robots.txt file according to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. For example, to ban our crawler from your entire site, your robots.txt file should have an entry like this:
User-agent: PropsmartCrawlerand to ban all search engines, it would look like this:
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Do note, however, that banning the PropsmartCrawler and other search engines may result in less traffic to your website by valuable customers who may find you via a Propsmart or other search engine search.
Please suggest your site, and we will evaluate it as a possible addition to our data sources.
Yes. Here's a good Web Robots FAQ and a good explanation of the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
