How to Identify and block fake Listings on your Listing Portal

Real-estate listing portals are one of the most vulnerable websites to fake listings. Maintaining unique listings is of utmost importance for every real-estate business. However, increase in bot traffic has been causing exponential increase of fake listings. These fake listings have been diluting the uniqueness of real-estate companies impacting their business in several ways.

What are fake listings?

Listings created by competitors / fraudsters that are fake in nature with an intent to pull down the business or hurt the brand image. Increase in fake listings over the past few years has been a growing concern of the classifieds. They fail to filter these listings using conventional methods like CAPTCHA / Firewall.

Who creates them?

• Competitors: It damages business by filling their website with fake listings that degrades a genuine user’s experience. This deters genuine users from using the website for their home search and buying and renting. Competitors use automated scripts / bots to post fake listings on the website in order to pull down the business.


• Spammers: The Internet is filled with fraudsters and mischievous spammers who use form spamming to create multiple fake listings on websites. Individual spammers post fake listings on the websites either manually or using automated scripts.


• Brokers / Property Sellers: Many listing sites are covered with fake listings those are duplicated to create an impression of possessing multiple listings. Brokers are often seen replicating the same listings in order to receive more eyeballs on their site.

Impact of Fake listings on the business

• Customer Loss: Customers trying to access fake listings are often mislead with fake information. It makes the customers lose their confidence in the service. This often drives customers away to the competitor’s website. The business loses its credibility and brand image gets degraded.


• Lower search Rankings: Fake listings are often built with irrelevant content diluting the unique value proposition. Immaterial information pulls down the business value impacting SEO ranking. This results in competitors gaining visibility with higher SEO ranking and better traffic.


• Degraded website performance: Increase in fake listings are due to overload in bot traffic on the website. Heavy bot traffic impacts the website performance resulting in increased CPU load and higher server cost. It results in poor user experience which leads to users switching to the competitor’s website having better user experience.

How does InfiSecure block fake listings?

• Protect unique value proposition: InfiSecure helps online classifieds block their competitors from posting fake listings in real time. Eliminating fake listings enables market leaders to improve their user experience and brand image by providing customers high quality service with unique offerings.


• Optimize website traffic: Blocking fake listings permits online classifieds to offer their customers unique and validated listings. With high value service, more genuine users are driven to the website. This helps classifieds improve their brand image and optimise the traffic.


• Improve SEO ranking: Bot protection allows the classifieds to maintain their unique value proposition and also achieve fast page loads on website. Having unique content and high-performance leads to improvised SEO ranking.


• Improve website performance: Blocking fake listings leads to the reduction in load on the server. Eliminating undesired traffic on the server helps optimize website performance thereby enhancing user experience.

To avoid fake listings on the website, it is desirable to ensure that the website is protected from unwanted bot attacks. InfiSecure has been enabling online classifieds to sanitize their website traffic and block fake listings that might impact their business.