We have several hotel and resort clients here at Screen Pilot which allows our SEO team to consistently explore new ways to gain coveted Google back-links as well as back-links in the other main search engines like Yahoo and Bing. The primary goal for the hotel and resort industry, when talking about the internet, is to sell rooms and generate great online reputation in social and other user generated content (UGC) media. This led to the creation of many “review” sites. In the travel vertical, TripAdvisor.com is one of the pivotal players in this space. Online travel agencies (OTAs) like Orbitz have integrated proprietary user reviews into their site and vertical search players like Kayak, have integrated 3^rd party reviews from service like Epinions and others. Trip Advisor’s key consumer proposition is creating consumer-facing content that other travelers deem relevant to their shopping process. Users can post reviews, rate certain aspects of a property and even share their vacation pictures. In an attempt to generate additional revenues and capitalize on their traffic volumes, Trip Adivsor, in a move away from their traditional business model, have created what’s called a Business Listing.  These listings would include a link to the hotel or resort website.  So, the SEO team here at Screen Pilot decided to have a closer look at the  TripAdvisor.com ‘Business Listing‘ option and to see if there really is any SEO value from having a business listing with them.

To begin the experiment we looked at numerous New York City hotels, that all have business listings on TripAdvisor.com, with a hyper-linked URL to their website. Next we looked up the back-links in Google and Yahoo for all of the properties. Surprisingly, none of them showed any back-links from TripAdvisor.com. On one of the properties we profiled, the Library Hotel, we did find a back-link from Trip Advisor, but it was coming from the French version of the site.  It also was part of a review that someone had embedded a link. As we could not find any back-links from TripAdvisor.com for these properties, we then went back to the Trip Advisor business listing itself and found the real issue.

Once we pulled the TripAdvisor.com business listing source code, we noticed that the actual link is not physically there but rather JavaScript code instead. This script is generating the link and its anchor text on the page. When the search engine spiders visit a page with a Business Listing on it, this script is not allowing the link to be indexed which would normally show up as a backlink from TripAdvisor.com. So, as a business owner, you are still getting the traffic from people clicking on the link in your listing, but from an SEO standpoint you are not getting the “link juice” from the TripAdvisor.coms’ 8/10 page rank!

Some might ask the question “Why not just drop the link in a review on TripAdvisor.com and that will suffice?” Well, on TripAdvisor.com you can’t do that. Unlike the French version of the website, the .com version does not allow reviewers to put hyperlinks within their reviews.

So the moral of the story is this, be sure you know the full SEO benefit you are getting from purchasing a listing on any social travel related website, especially TripAdvisor.com if that is something you think you’re getting. In their defense, we find nothing on their site that remotely even leads anyone to believe that there is SEO value in a Business Listing, it simply is assumed that because they are offering a “link” to your property website, there is inherent link value associated with it.

If you’re a hotel or resort owner and you want to talk to us about SEO for your property, please get in touch. We have tons of experience in amazingly successful hotel internet marketing & SEO campaigns and we are a full-service digital marketing agency.

On May 5, 2010, Google changed the way people use the Internet. They have combined all the elements of Universal search, images, videos, webpages, blogs, etc., into an easier way to harness all the online knowledge they hold available. With their new three column UI (User Interface), Google gives the searcher the ability to sort their organic results by images, videos, blogs and news, etc. and then take it a step further by then drilling down deeper within that particular aspect of ‘Universal search’. The question arises, how will this new UI affect the hospitality industry and how can the hospitality industry take advantage of it?

The biggest effect will be how searchers use the internet. While not new – just a lot more obvious to users – these enhanced ways of sorting organic results will allow searchers to explore new angles of a subject. In the hospitality realm, this means searchers will be looking for you in many new ways such as through blogs, pictures, videos, and maps. This new UI will also expose hotels or resorts that have not invested in videos or other forms of social media. The ones that did will be in a great position to harness these new streams potential search organic traffic, while the others might begin to fall back.

If you are one of the unlucky ones that did not invest in developing online videos or in other forms of universal search, you can still get in the game and take advantage of this new Google UI. Some of the ways you can do this is by developing various videos illustrating the many facets of your hotel or resort and posting them on YouTube or your favorite online video site. Another way is to claim your local business listing and develop it with your coupons, pictures and videos. This will ensure your business will have the opportunity to show up in the local listings and on Google maps. Another way is to have plenty of pictures on your website that have proper alt tags. This will allow them to be found easier and with the targeted organic search terms you are going after. As for blog and news sort feature, that can be developed through press releases or even putting a blog on your own site.

Whichever way you look at it, the new Google UI will provide the hospitality industry the ability to gain a lot more exposure through previously under exposed search channels. If your website is older or you have not been investing in a universal online marketing plan, you can still take advantage of the many new features Google is offering with this new UI. Universal search is where the Internet is heading and the sooner the hospitality industry understands and takes advantage of it, the more profit there is to be made.