Forum Moderators: phranque
I have 3 travel related sited. The one I have had for about 4 years, the second one for about a year, the 3rd one for about 8 months. This 3rd one is for more specialized travel (spa vacations to be exact), however the other 2 focus on general HOTEL bookings worldwide.
My oldest site use to be part of Bigstep, which ironically, until a year ago, I was still with. Seems once I moved to Hostsave, my ranking dropped considerably anyhow, but again the path changed, so that was to be expected.
ALSO, before I EVER decided to develop a site for SPA Vacations, I decided to add a few pages to my first 2 sites, devoted to spa vacations, even though originally is was all about hotels. Unfortunately in doing this, I have noticed that over the past few months, that instead of people finding me through key words like "cheap hotels", or "hotel reservations", or "hotels in Texas, ect", the paths used for someone to find me with keywords, were nothing but SPA related now.
Thats all fine and dandy, but I really did not expect the focus to change from hotel bookings to strictly spa vacations. Every referrer path I would see would say "spa getaway to blankety blank" or "spa vacation to blankety blank". Not that I was ranking that fantastic for hotel keywords to begin with, but in the beginning with my first website, I was seeing a decent amount of hits daily.
Well I added this last website devoted entirely to SPA Vacations back in January. It is ranking quite well. So what I did, over this past week, is make the decision to revamp my other two websites to strictly hotel bookings and got rid of the 4 pages of spa travel content on each of those first two sites. I just felt that with the ONE website ranking so well for spas, it was silly to confuse the issue and what I also found is that bookings from the other two were relatively "null" for spa vacations anyhow, perhaps because those 1st two websites were not entirely focused on spa travel.
Needless to say, since removing those spa pages from the 1st two sites and any reference to spa vacations whatsover, from keywords, etc, my hits have gone down the totem pole in a big way.... Oh boy, I have had TODAY, a total of 8 hits between the first 2 urls LOL! I had also went in and tweaked title's, meta keywords and descriptions and revamped my wording on pages to reflect more towards "hotel reservations" again.
Now I have always been listed on all the search engines for the 1st one, my oldest one, but only with GOOGLE on my second. But I have to say my second website has done very poorly from day one. But its almost a carbon copy of the 1st one, just a different name, but the name is quite catchy.
My question is this, did I make a BIG MISTAKE removing that spa content from my 1st two sites? That meant deducting 4 pages for each. So I imagine I have just about killed any ranking for those two at this point for anything.
maybe I need to add more content pages for those first two sites to make up for what I removed, but just feeling very frustrated thinking that I am now back to square ZERO...with virtually almost no HITS to my websites..
<h1>Big important headline</h1>
Google seems to notice and care what text is on your pages, and what tags are used. Text wrapped in H tags get more weight, and supposedly EM and STRONG tags do too. I'm not sure about that part, I've only heard it secondhand.
Whatever the case, give Google some more time, and seriously work on the words you use (on the site and hidden in the META tags).
I'll tell you a good secret to ensure that you have decent keywords: use Google's adwords system just for maybe $5 worth of ads on a VERY general term. For example, if I were you, I'd get an adword campaign running with just 1 keyword: hotel. It's crazy-broad, your ad will run for 5 minutes before the $5 is blown (be sure you CAP IT at $5). But here is what you get: you get to see all the search terms people used that had to do with hotels. You'll see some people entered "Disneyland hotel" or "hotel reservations" or maybe neither of those will appear in your logs at all. Maybe nowadays everyone types "hotel bookings." Whatever the case, you do a very GENERAL ad so you can see what real people SPECIFICALLY typed. Once you know, change your META tags all around to match the keywords and phrases that were most appropriate and frequent.
Oh, and get yourself listed in more search engines! There are only 4 major engines left anyway -- all the small places use the big 4. Get listed in Yahoo, and you'll automatically get listed in AltaVista. Get listed in Ask Jeeves and you'll get listed in 5 or 6 other spinoffs. And get listed in MSN, and you've covered most of the remaining market.
ill try it.
