How's your location-hotels site faring?

[glengara]

Not my sector, (thank God!) but I suspect it was badly hit by that slight rumpus back in November.
So, have most made their way back, or are there still many MIAs?

[bagatell]

I have a holiday property site that wasn't effected at all by Forida. However, a check on my SERPs a few days ago showed everything down the toilet but it's all bounced back to where it was previously. I just hope that was a server issue and not more tinkering with the algo!

[Bobby]

My B&B site has been exiled to the outer edge of the galaxy for 3 and 4-word searches including country location.

Even 4 word searches with city/country do not appear in the top 100 anymore, and there aren't so many of us here in my town!

Of course, if I could only train all the holiday searchers to search for "blue and purple mycity mycountry +a" (yup, the old + trick, just throw in the letter "a" or the word "is" or any simple word you'd find on most pages) and we magically pop up again at the top.

Anybody else smell a filter?

[mogwai]

I have a couple of hotel based sites. They dropped like lead balloons back in Nov/Dec. They had on average around 30% of their pages dropped. They now seem to be creeping back into the serps and reservations are almost back to pre Nov figures. This drop coupled with the seasonal drop off resulted in a cheap Christmas present for my girlfriend this year ;)

I've noticed an awful lot more junk in the serps since that update, lots and lots of urls listed with no descriptions. One search I tried for a particular hotel gave me around 8 such listings in the top 15 from the same network of spammy cross-linked sites.

Hotel affiliate sites have always been massively competitive and it seems to be getting much worse lately. A couple of years ago you could make a decent living from it. These days with the chains trying to put the squeeze on the intermediaries and just about every man and his dog building sites it's becoming more hassle than it's worth.

[bagatell]

My "country, keyword" serps have dropped out again but the "region, keyword" ones are as good if not better now.

[tenerifejim]

After Florida my website with a whole host of information about a very popular European resort including hotels, restaurants etc and was number 2 - 5 for terms such as 'holiday location' or 'holidays in location'. Austin has wiped these out and simply replaced the listings with results from large holiday portal sites.

However, the most frustrating thing so far has been the jobs sections. A search for 'location jobs' or 'jobs in location' before had us at number one. Now still leaves a whole host of portal travel sites at number one, and fills the rest with job information portals. There is no sign of any site actually with details of 'jobs in location' for about seven pages and these are message board enquiries. Unbelievable.

I've just have to up my adwords expenditure to make up the difference. Maybe this is G's new tatic ;-)

[rcjordan]

Yeah, pretty much wiped out or the serps are cut up so badly that they scare the traffic away.

[rogue]

No change here since pre-florida - still #1 but some of my destination location/service related pages gone down the tubes.

[Sunset_Jim]

I have a vacation travel destination guide site which covers all aspects of travel related to my city including hotels. Before Florida this site was in the top 5 for most highly competitive search terns including "mycity hotels." After Florida all of the pages for the most competive search terms like "my city hotels", "my city motels" and "my city condo rentals" either vanished or were 300 plus down in the Serps. Austin only made matters worse. My site is not overly optimized and is well linked by other similar travel sites. Some have sugested that my site is to diversified theme wise and that I should narrow my focus to fewer travel topics, but if I do this my site will no longer be a travel guide with complete travel information. I'm at a loss as to what to do.

[glitterball]

I have a destination guide site and a destination-hotels type site too.
The Guide is doing really well now, even the pages that have very little text on them are performing incredible well for really competitive searches.

The commercial lodgings selling site is off the radar in Google along with all the relevant competition.

It's total madness at the moment, as I've said before, the wrong site is coming up in the SERPS.

[rogue]

<The commercial lodgings selling site is off the radar in Google along with all the relevant competition.>
The selling sites have never beat me in the results even though they try very hard. My simple listings page is basically an informational page for where to stay when people come to "my town" to use another service I provide.

[europeforvisitors]

I have a destination guide site and a destination-hotels type site too.
The Guide is doing really well now, even the pages that have very little text on them are performing incredible well for really competitive searches.
The commercial lodgings selling site is off the radar in Google along with all the relevant competition.

Have you considered working the commercial hotel information into your destination guide instead of maintaining it as a separate entity? That could make all the difference.

[rogue]

It will

[Powdork]

Some have sugested that my site is to diversified theme wise and that I should narrow my focus to fewer travel topics,

Google no longer likes focus. Google likes blurry. Make your site about everything!