I am going to try to keep this post as un-technical as possible.  But hey, when your start talking about Google and PageRank I think most people start to tune out.

First off I have more experience with http://www.mls.ca/ so I will be using this as an example, but a brief glance at realtor.com suggests that they likely suffer from the same problem.

So here it goes, from what I have been noticing MLS.ca generally forces all links off of their listings pages to be masked through a redirector page.  For an example, I have chosen a listing by Susan Man that we worked with her on.  In her MLS listing, the links to her own site plus the links to all external websites have been changed to look like

http://www.mls.ca/redirect.aspx?r=http%3a%2f%2fwww.prompton.com&t=org

I believe that the reason for this is so that MLS.ca can keep statistics about what people click on, the problem is that they force Google and other search engines to view pages the same way, which goes against Google’s Website Design Guidelines. MLS.ca should allow Google and other search engines to view all links transparently.  It would help the online presence of the real-estate community as a whole.  It would also allow MLS.ca to easily remove some of the extra hits Google makes from MLS’s already slow servers.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that doing this would speed up MLS.ca, but it would be a step in the right direction. 

P.S. My assumption that this is not already being done comes from the fact that I was searching through MLS.ca listings pages using googles stored cache, try typing “cache:” and then a website address into google to see what I mean.

I would like to add something more, I am not talking about MLS.ca giving its listing data away to third parties.  I understand the reasoning behind not doing that.   I am only talking about them having a system that allows Google Page Rank to be calculated effectivly for the sites linked to from MLS.ca, this would increase the pagerank of all the realtors on MLS