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
-
Could another site copying my content hurt my ranking?
Earlier this week I asked why a page of mine might not be ranking locally. (https://moz.com/community/q/what-could-be-stopping-us-from-ranking-locally). Maybe this might be part of the answer – another firm has copied huge chunks of my website copy: **My company: **https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The other company: http://studio3dm.com/studio3dm-com/video/ Could this be causing my page to not rank? And is there anything I can do about it, other than huff and puff to the other firm? (Which I am already doing.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagster0 -
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites
I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website. Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssltrustpaul
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites. So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all. The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website. I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.0 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I have a site and we rank very competitively on Google, but we would like to increase our exposure on Bing and Yahoo. I was wondering if anybody might have some tips or pointers for increasing your ranking on Bing. Also, if anybody knows of any Bing ranking guides or top ranking factors for Bing that would be very useful too. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420