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Yahoo Travel continues to grow, while the competition
of smaller travel sites continued to get deleted from the index. Any comments Mike, Tim...?
And everyone else is free to start their own search engine and so the same.
By excluding competition for their own products they are not providing a service to the general population, in other words, they are misleading people in to believing that if they need travel, they are the only answer.
It would be different if they were just Yahootravel.com, then sure, they can do as they wish. But to exclude true travel sites (admittedly like mine...) that offer much better deals on many many products is not only unfair to the owners of said sites, but very unfair to the general population that are looking for travel deals.
People like to shop online for the best deals, if Yahoo has the best deals, then they should get the biz, but at least people should be able to find legitimate alternatives and there are many that beat Yahoo's prices.
True...for now. However, there may come a point in time when the SEs overstep their bounds and the DOJ gets involved. (Far in the future, of course)
Example:
Sabre once got nailed for not giving "fair" treatment to certain parties who didn't want to go along with Sabre's restrictive policies. They were sued over the "order" in which they displayed travel options.
(Isn't it amazing what a hungry lawyer can do with a few loosely connected facts <G>)
I bet Yahoo lawyers would be all over them like s&%#
on stink.
One can only hope...I make certain I let my displeasure
of Yahoo's results on Google known to G at every opportunity. Dissatisfied with your search results?
There are only, what, three or four major hotel/travel databases in existance where all travel affiliates draw their info from. From the SEs point of view, how many repititions of the exact same hotel descriptions does the net really need?
The typical hotel aff site copies those descriptions word-for-word adding nothing in the way of fresh and insightful info to the mix. Two days ago I clicked through Y!s directory of travel sites until the Google toolbar shut me off, and 99% of the sites I looked at were exact copies of each other.
Sooner or later it's going to take more than downloading a database and slapping a cheesy logo on it, to be successful in the travel sector.
Agreed. However there are sites, such as ours, that pay enormous fees for technology that allow us to compete in certain segments. There are few like us because there is a barrier to entry such as being required to carry $1,000,000 of e/o insurance and being members of ASTA, IATAN etc. as well as having to pay tens of thousands of dollars to hook up to specialized databases.
These companies are legitimate online travel agencies and not just affiliate relationships. They provide services and customer support that megolithic enterprises such as Yahoo Travel, Expedia, Orbitz etc. can not match.
I believe this is what consumers want and companies such as ours give it to them plus save them money.
So SE's should allow the public to find them.
I think that if someone found a site through Yahoo and saved a lot of money because they searched on Yahoo, that they would become loyal Yahoo users. If they only found Yahoo products, they would go somewhere else to find deals....
The problem with the Y! "penalties" is so widespread and deep now that it leads people to either to believe that Yahoo! is deleting the competition or that they are just so plain incompetant that they can't differentiate between original sites and Affiliate content.
three or four major hotel/travel databases
thats only true for sites trying pull one easy database and offer hotels worldwide albeit with a multitude of targetted sites. However many smaller niche sites are hands on with their hotels. They use their own info and take the time to take their own pics and contact the hotels directly to get the real info. They also can choose to link each individual hotel to many other companies buying hotel rooms in bulk and truly discounting them. These companies are not part of the major databases. These sites dont stand a chnace in yahoo.
That's not my idea of a quality index...
Pretty much the only traffic we get from Yahoo is via overture paid listings (the absolute only reason we continue to use overture), but even that is peanuts compared to what we get from Google - guess you can't have everything.
Is anyone familiar with the relationship between tripadvisor and yahoo? It seems that 100% link farm -- please show me some original (not user submitted) content there! Yet it has no problems getting listed in Yahoo...
