Carol, there are several sites that connect house-sitters with home owners. We were most impressed with HouseCarers.com, but see also the ones mentioned above by Tom Bentley.

Thanks for sharing this. It sounds like a great way to travel and not only afford it but get paid for it. One of the reasons I started writing was to travel more. Your post has certainly given me something to think about. Thanks

Carol

Don, it would definitely be easy to try to abuse this, especially if I were to put up a hundred sites for every city I want to house-sit in.

Seems like it would be difficult to fool Google for ever with the ploy you uncovered — have to create a separate site for each with unique content that reads well.

I have seen a variation of this tactic that is very SPAMmy, however. I once Googled “web developers , Ohio” to see what my possible competition was. I tripped across the page of some guy who is a solo web developer who claimed to build web sites for local businesses. I looked more closely and saw that his area code was for a town in Pennsylvania. Then I found an “index list” at the bottom of his page that listed about 100 cities in Ohio and each one went to a clone page that asserted that he’s a local web developer in each of those towns. So, apparently, this person has a tool that regurgitates clone pages.

NOT what you’re doing. I can see applying this principle in an extremely targeted way to specific potential opportunities.

Tom, I read an excellent guest post you wrote about a house-sit in the Caribbean that went a little less than smoothly.

Stephanie and I have been members of HouseCarers.com, but we didn’t really look much there. Since we’ve moved to Ashland, Oregon, we’re out of the snow belt and we’re in civilization, so we’re house-sitting less, primarily in SF during the winter.

Do feel free to contact us, but remember we primarily only house-sit in December and January.

But your idea of targeting an area and hosting your own site sounds very effective. Good thinking. And perhaps we’ll ask you guys if you want to house-site our place outside of Watsonville sometime, since I see from your site you’ve done some Santa Cruz County stints. Thanks for the site idea!