travel chain stores, should I link with them?

the travel industry is being invaded by chain store style travel portals

[freejung]

An interesting situation seems to be occuring in the travel industry. Travel agents, affiliate programs, and others are putting up mass-produced travel portals for every major city and region. They're trading links like crazy within the travel category. They're mostly not very big yet, but they seem to be coming on very strong. They are using automated link-exchange programs. I represent a small hotel. So my question is, do you think I should trade links with these guys? Some of them have a separate domain for each portal, some are just using subdomains. Some of them have been listed and have some PR, others don't. It seems to me that maybe they have the rest of us in the treavel industry over a barrel; there are so many of them, if we don't trade links with them we may be left behind. But on the other hand they seem kind of spammy, so I'm not sure if they represent a risk or not.

[Skier]

Hello Freejung, welcome to the forum

I can't answer your question whether trading links with these guys is is a good idea or not. I wouldn't count on them being there for long though.

I too have a smallish accommodation site that like most, depends on a location keyword. Every month or two a new site or group of sites like ones you describe show up on my serps. A month or two later they are gone. I know I get all bent out of shape when it happens, but over time the legitimate sites for my category always return to the top.

Speaks well for the SE's really. Relax - trust the Google.

[europeforvisitors]

I'd steer clear of those sites, and I wouldn't link to them. Google (the #1 search engine) has warned against "linking to bad neighborhoods," participating in automated link exchanges and other "link farm" schemes, etc., and the risks of being banned from the search index are greater than the risks of being left behind by the spammers.

[paynt]

Yes freejung, welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].

I think I know what you are talking about freejung and I can see your concern. I just posted in Reciprocal link success percentages [webmasterworld.com] about my sorting process. In that I have both a hold column and a toss column. In the hold column go all the sites that don’t meet the standards I’ve set for my campaign but are not quite ready for the garbage heap. I might place the directories you are talking about there and consider them under approval. When I run through every other wonderful and possible stream I can follow I often turn back and resort this column again. Who knows but that these directories might in time build into something I would want to be included in, or perhaps not.

I only toss really tacky sites, sites with PR0 (sorry but no time), sites with trick linking, and sites that just scream, “Ban Me!”. That might be these directories but then again, maybe not.