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One of these sites is a guide to the destination and it's position in the SERPS was totally unaffected by Florida. - It would seem that this is an 'authority' site.
Another site is totally commercial and for the sake of argument lets call the destination 'blue' and the product that I am selling 'widgets'.
My site (the domain name) is bluewidgets.com.
When the -hgdfhge search was working, my site was number 1 for the 'blue widgets -hgdfhge' search but 500+ for 'blue widgets'.
The thing that gets me annoyed is the current #2 serp for 'blue widget' is a page on a review site that only links to me! I have at least 5 pages in the top 100 for this term - that are much less relevant to anyone searching for Blue Widgets than the bluewidgets.com website.
If Google have penalised commercial sites in the main SERPS in order to promote Froogle, where does this leave Travel-related sites who cannot list their products in Froogle?
Any opinions from others in the Travel market?
A search for 'snipped' will bring up 85 of the same exact site (oh...excuse me, the background color changes) but different domains.
Is this the new technique then to get listed?
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 3:48 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2004]
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 5:42 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2004]
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 5:43 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2004]
btw can anybody remember roughly how long this happened for the last time, I seem to think it was about 2 months of this then things went back to some type of normality.
If you do feel that these type of SERPs are here to stay I would really be interested in knowing why you think that.
I have just been looking for some info for my girlfriend for her university project and have had to revert to atw and ink ( better results). In this case it is not googles fault because the site that had 2 pages of SERPS ( see my last post) is cloaking. People do not cloak for ink yet as the market share is too small
And I believe 8 months from now my small sites will be back to the top. Google changing algo will benefit large site one month and small the next, it just the way it is.
Just go with the times.
Don't make me laugh. How will that help the user? Instead of a single affiliate site with all info about all hotels in a city which instantly checks which hotels are available the user will be confronted with 50 hotel sites to plough through, each with its own availability search and pricing plans.
Improving the user experience? I think not!
Or perhaps they will put all the different booking inventory suppliers there? Will that help? Not at all. The user only needs one. They all use the same database anyway.
No - what Google needs to do is put a few of each there. More or less like it has been:
A few affiliate sites
A few hotel sites
A few general information sites
A few generic booking sites
Diversity is the key :)
So they won't put affiliate sites at the top of SERPS? What will they put there instead? The hotel sites?
Don't make me laugh. How will that help the user? Instead of a single affiliate site with all info about all hotels in a city which instantly checks which hotels are available the user will be confronted with 50 hotel sites to plough through, each with its own availability search and pricing plans.
IMHO, this is a no-brainer: The default should be to return what the user asked for.
The user who's searching for "cityname hotels" should get search results for individual hotels in Cityname. It isn't Google's job to decide that he'd be better off with a Cityname hotel directory or booking site. (After all, it's easy enough for the user to search on "cityname hotel directories" or "book a hotel in cityname" if that's the kind of information he wants.)
I also have #1 in the SERP for "hotels $destination" and "$destination hotels", so I can't say that Google is falling down on the Algo.
The thing is, the database/template driven sites, in general will rank well, if they've been designed correctly.
However, those types of sites are no match for a site that has made a concerted effort to become an authority for $destination. Its not worth their time to spend the time and effort to build the content necessary for it, not for every city in the world. They get most of their SERPs by default.
Doubtless in big money destinations like New York City, Paris, London, etc they *do* spend the time to make their site more competitive "by hand".
If you are getting beat in the travel SERPs for $destination, add a hundred new pages of real content about $destination, get more on target, inbound links, and see how you are doing 2-3 weeks later.
Why should Google, Yahoo or anyone else for that matter massage the results to remove those sites just because they rank well.
Let the users vote with their mouse.
In my opinion, If Google continues with the current serps relating to travel, as soon as another search engine comes along that can give google some real competition, users will vote with their mouse and leave google in droves.
If I had to venture a guess I would assume that travel related searches comprises at least 25% of googles traffic.
They should really think it over, no way can they afford to loose that traffic.
What I've noticed in approx. 20 selected sites is that those sites which have done well have links/partner/resources (call them what you want) pages with a good PR (around 4 or more) and those which have suffered have bad PR or no PR on their links pages.
Can anybody confirm/disprove this theory. It would be good to get some feedback from various travel sectors to see if this theory stands up or not.
Why? Because Google would benefit in several ways by changing its algorithm so that affiliate pages--and maybe e-commerce pages, too--showed up lower in rankings for non-commercial searches (meaning any search that didn't include keywords like "buy" or "book" or "shop" or "dealer"):
1) The quality of search results would improve, at least for search phrases that weren't explicitly commercial.
2) There would be less incentive to use questionable SEO techniques, because affiliate links would keep even the most slickly designed spam page from getting into the top 10 or 20 results. As a result, the costs of Google's whack-a-mole spam fighting would be reduced.
3) AdWords revenues would increase.
Mind you, I'm not advocating this; I'm just saying it could make a lot of sense from Google's point of view. (I'd stand to lose revenues myself if it happened, because I do have affiliate links and some affiliate pages on my editorial travel-planning site.)
Can anybody confirm/disprove this theory.
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Sort of. But for sure, not in all areas or given search terms.
From what I have seen, for the "money two keyword search terms", example "London Hotels" links and site broadness are the only way to get there. Same in most all other major cities.
However, alter the search phrase slightly such as London UK Hotels, or even London Hotel and the pattern seems to change.
To me the whole thing smells like a filter for the money searches - it could really be quite simple such as.
If a page ranks well (on page factors) for a money two keyword search term a second filter takes over that basically says (depress page results) unless x amount of backlinks are present from x amount of sites, then allow
Really stinks in MHO
Even the content provides no cushion
That hasn't been my experience. Quite the opposite.
It's worth remembering that Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Over the long term, SERPs are likely to emphasize pages that help Google fulfill that mission, and pages that focus on sales will need to generate traffic with ads or with links from information pages.
that there is a great dish (snaketongue) to try in the cucumber city cuz superjumpers travel monolith will only let people know that frog tongues is the only viable choice
HUH?
To me the whole thing smells like a filter for the money searches
Trawler, I couldn't agree with you more!
I have spent a serious amount of time analyzing a few sites and am 100% sure there is a filter being applied. I even called up a friend of mine who does similar programming to get a second opinion and he concurs.
The real question for us and others affected by this filter should be what elements do our websites have in common that have triggered it?
I have observed a few of my own in addition to other webmasters and am unable to pinpoint anything concrete but it seems like certain $ keywords trigger it and you're either in or you're out.
>>IMHO, this is a no-brainer: The default should be to return what the user asked for. The user who's searching for "cityname hotels" should get search results for individual hotels in Cityname.
I beg to differ. Google's mission is also to read your mind (Larry Page). Just because you ask for City Hotels, doesn't mean that's all you want. The number of people searching for "city hotels" dwarfs "city hotel reservations" or any other permutation including booking, book, directories etc.
Does that mean the user wants to read about the ins-and-outs hotels in that city? Do they want to read about occupancy rates? Do they want to know how many hotels there are? Probably not, but the information is out there in the index.
Do they want to see every hotel's web page? Some of them, maybe. But most of them just want to book a room. People don't make travel one of the largest commercial areas on the web buy reading about hotels for fun. They do it by buying their services!
In my opinion Google should deliver what the user wants - not necessarily what he asks for. Sounds counter-intuitive, but if you know what most people mean when they say something else, you are on the way to reading their mind. The technology is out there to start doing this.
In my opinion Google should deliver what the user wants - not necessarily what he asks for. Sounds counter-intuitive, but if you know what most people mean when they say something else, you are on the way to reading their mind. The technology is out there to start doing this.
I think it's more likely that we'll eventually see either a segregation or a devaluation of most commercial results in the main index (at least for searches that aren't explicitly commercial), which will bring about a dramatic reduction in spam for the top 10, 20, or 50 search results which will have the happy side effect (for Google, anyway) of promoting AdWords/AdSense advertising.
IMHO, the affiliate and booking sites that continue to do well in Google's listings will be those that add real value to what they're selling. There's a hotel-booking outfit with "By" in its name that comes to mind: It doesn't just use boilerplate hotel pages; instead, it creates its own attractive pages that have photos and detailed information on the hotels in its index. In some cases, the site's hotel descriptions are probably better than those on the hotels' own Web sites. The result is a site that feels as much like an information site as a booking site. I don't know how it's doing in Google's index at the moment, but if Google were to bump the usual boilerplate hotel pages from its index tomorrow, the site I'm describing would be one of the few left standing. (And no, I don't have anything to do with the site, nor do I know the owners.)
IMHO, the affiliate and booking sites that continue to do well in Google's listings will be those that add real value to what they're selling.
___
While I agree in principal with this statement, that is a well rounded site will survive by adding value) how can one expect Google to determine what real value is with the current algo.
I mean, really look at what they are serving up, many link directories with a good deal of them having links that are not even operating properly, re-directs, cloaked pages, it really is bad in some areas.
In MHO if a user types in Cityname Hotels I would think he or she are looking for either a booking site to check rates, or the actual hotels websites. I doubt that the user is looking for link directories to go on a fishing expedition to find information about the hotels
A while back, we ran a test on one of our boilerplate booking sites. We wanted to see what the effect was of adding detailed city specific content to the site. We chose specific search terms (terms we now refer to as "money search terms, (Example Cityname Hotels) and tracked not only the bookings ratio but also compiled a history of the users paths through the specific city content.
We conducted this test this in 10 different cities. While I do not feel that this should be written in stone and you should live a die by it, I will share the results of the experiment. Take it for whatever you want.
What we found was that for the "money terms" (City Hotels) very few of the users ( less than 15%) actually ventured into the content even though it was readily available. Booking ratio's, durations, and cancellations remained very close to their historical average. This same pattern was found in all test cities. From this, we concluded that we gave the user pretty much what they were asking for, (prior to adding the content) that is, a simple but effective way to view hotels and check rates for the desired city. Hence very few ventured into the content.
Now, in cases where the search term was broadened, (Cityname hotel information) ( Cityname Travel Resorts) etc.. We found that greater than 65% ventured into the content. Booking ratios on these visitors were about half that of the money terms, and the booking durations were longer. One interesting facet about these visitors was that they had a greater cancellation rate ( quite a bit more) that the visitors from the "money terms"
In the end, we decided against broadening the site with content, but instead, provided sort of a semi weekly update of the latest hotel deals nationwide. It proved to be very popular.
The one item that I did not mention above but will here is that the content added during the test did in fact increase traffic somewhat as there were more pages in the index, but, If one was to analyze the time spent to add that content to the 130 cities had we broadened the entire site, I doubt very much if the ROI would have been there.
In summary what we saw is that for the money search terms e.g.. "Cityname Hotels" most users are looking to check rates and book. They do not seem to be interested in other areas. And they certainly weren't their to read.
In MHO that's why Google filtered the money words, and left the other search terms unfiltered. The money search terms are the bread, butter, and gravy all wrapped up in two little words, it's exactly where the money is.
They want it, so they took it and left the crumbs for the rest of us.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 5:52 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2004]
Google's mission is also to read your mind (Larry Page)
Maybe in another 50 to 100 years, but for now please be realistic.
Google's mission:
Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Interesting experiment, and interesting results. Thanks for sharing the information. (Maybe online businesses should hire psychologists along with their SEOs to assess and predict user behavior!)
I agree that Google may be trying to get control of those "money words," but I don't think it's only to sell more AdWords (although that's certainly a plus for Google). It may also be an editorial reaction to what has become a huge, unwieldy, and increasingly cluttered index. Ultimately, Google will have to find a way to deliver more targeted results without resorting to "advanced search" forms that are too complicated for the average user. Maybe it will be as simple as adjacent search boxes for "I want information on: " and "I want to spend money on: ." If that were to happen, your content pages might valuable if only to bring in traffic on both sides of the aisle. :-)
