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I am in the planning stages of a travel-related website for my local area. Since it is very competitive, and mostly deals with hotels, I was thinking of going the "product review" route and focus my site around customer reviews of local hotels, clubs, condos, events, etc. However, places like Yahoo! Travel and Tripadvisor appear to be my biggest rival--but they don't have a foothold on the top 1-6 Google/MSN ranking for my keywords.
Now, since none of the local sites (mostly spammers) will link to my site because it's commercial, do you all think it's best that I scrap the "commercialized" portion of my site and just focus on getting a good ranking through the creation of "innocent" content such as educational articles, local history stories, timely information? By doing this, I can get a good PR by getting linked by my competitors, similar sites, and maybe even some big PR9 sites.
The plan, obviously, would be to eventually transform my site into a more commercialized "reviews" portal once good PR and linking has been achieved. Maybe in half a year?
Please, help a fellow webmaster out. I am not going to be a spammer, nor will I pollute the search engines with "do or die" tactics like so many others are doing these days. I will put out a valuable resource that that is timely, informative, and useful to most visitors.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to your responses.
There's a wealth of on-topic travel reciprocals out there (many, many, many thousands) - just go the whole hog.
