Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs
-
Hello,
I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some.
The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved?
Regards
-
The underlying thing is that they are the few sites that are doing it, so in the absence of a better option, Google shows these sites instead. Think of ehow.com or ask.com, they don't provide a great experience to the user, but you will notice on those types of searches, there are not any better options out there.
When I say dynamic, I don't mean it as it is created on the fly. The URL has parameters that the server sees and knows to fetch the corresponding city from the server. I am not 100% positive, but from past experience I am willing to bet there is some kind of auto-fill tag like %CITY% that the server will plug in the city from the URL parameter. The rest of the copy never changes
Example: http://www.travelsite.com/flights-from-boston-to-new-york-bos-to-lga
Copy on page: blah blah blah Boston to New York blah blah blah. If you were to change either of the cities the copy would remain the same but the city would update.
Crawlers will crawl the page after it has loaded, so as long as the "dynamic" content is loaded prior to that the crawler doesn't know any different.
If my memory serves pages only need to be 5-10% different in copy to not be counted as duplicate content. So if your title, H1 and a few words in the sentence and some links are different that just about does it.
Now this doesn't make it a great user experience and as StreamMarket stated below, eventually Google will take notice of this and will move them down in ranking. Of course, this also means that other sites (Airlines) need to do a better job at creating pages like this but are user focused and not search engine focused.
-
Thanks for the replay Shawn! Can you please guide how this is done? I mean these are the dynamic pages with no or less content then how come they get indexed in Google and then ranked?
-
Hi,
As you all know Google is on spree of Algorithm updates from last few years, sooner or later every website on web will be effected that is using wrong ways to get ranked, which is against Google Policies.
Thanks
-
Being in the travel industry these are the same observations that I've noticed.
My theory behind a few of them:
- EMD - they use "cheap" and "air" or "travel" in the domain. I know that this was to be less effective, but like you stated they still rank well.
- Content is scraped - I've come across some of these sites that have actually taken our content and then outrank us.
- Actual brands haven't done a good enough job trying to rank for similar terms. Think about Ask.com or e-how.com, they rank not because they do a great job, but because no one else has anything better so Google is forced to rank them.
For your second question, I know one online travel agency put in a lot of money and time to create dynamic style pages when searching for flights between city 1 and city 2. You can alter the URL by changing the airport code and city name and the copy within that page remains the same with the exception of the city names. There are companies as well that will build out the actual pages with any desired URL structure you would want.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking drop
Hello there, Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking. Does anyone know what might be the cause? We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche Thanks, Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Manual action penalty revoked, rankings still low, if we create a new site can we use the old content?
Scenario:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
Baffled why my site is not improving in rankings.
Site shows up in the Map results when ever Google shows them. But for all other organic terms site ranks way back. Have lots of unique content and one page grade of an A. The site is http://alexpadillabailbonds.com The main page is optimized for "sacramento bail bonds" with a Moz grade of A yet its not included in the search results. It was before. Any insight from any one will greatly help. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreyzolnikov0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
REPOST: How much does "overall site semantic theme" influence rankings?
Hello everyone on the new cool Moz! I've optimized sites before that are dedicated to 1, 2 or 3 products and or services. These sites inherently talk about one main thing - so the semantics of the content across the whole site reflect this. I get these ranked well on a local level. Now, take an e-commerce site - which I am working on - 2000 products, all of which are quite varied - cookware, diningware, art, decor, outdoor, appliances... there is a lot of different semantics throughout the site's different pages. Does this influence the ranking possibilities? Your opinion and time is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320