Hi Folks,

We implemented Schema mark up on our hotel details page many months ago now (previously we had a different mark up language, but switched to Schema during a complete page re-design). Its been live for plenty of time now and is being picked up in webmaster tools.

http://www.asiarooms.com/en/singapore/singapore/175433-orchard_hotel_singapore.html

Even before we switched to Schema we had a very inconsistent display of rich snippet data in the search results and this has continued despite the mark up being implemented correctly.

For example, a search in Google Singapore for 'Orchard Hotel Singapore' shows the AsiaRooms.com listing without any rich snippets. You can see that the vast majority of our competitors like Agoda, Booking.com always show rich snippet data (search for 'orchard hotel singapore agoda' for example).

I have checked the hotel in the rich snippet testing tool and its marked up correctly such that it should feasibly show the review count and the score.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.asiarooms.com%2Fen%2Fsingapore%2Fsingapore%2F175433-orchard_hotel_singapore.html&html=

Whilst Agoda and Booking seem to display rich snippet data on literally EVERY hotel, its very inconsistent for AsiaRooms which is extremely frustrating - feels like some kind of punishment or favouritism.

Any ideas why this might be the case and anything I could try to resolve it?

Thanks,

Ben

Whose data set are you using to identify all the links? remember that Open Site Explorer for example is only reporting on a fraction of what exists out there on the internet. There may be lots of bad links, with heavy anchor text that aren't picked up in Open Site Explorer because they aren't deemed important enough sites to be crawled.

Majestic SEO and/or Linkdex will give you a much bigger index size and might catch some additional sites (if you haven't already gone down that route).

Ben

Do you have access to webmaster tools? If so did you receive a notification from Google informing you about unnatural links found pointing into your domain?

Are your ranking penalties site wide or tied to specific keywords and pages where you have focused heavy link building activities?

If you've just recently been hit then I suspect its entirely down to the unnatural link algo that seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. There is an excellent article on it here:

http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/

What industry are you in?

Are you looking for writers to construct posts you can submit to external sites OR writers who can submit guest posts on your site?

Have you tried services like oDesk? quality can be lacking, but you could try and do a deal whereby you only pay if the post is accepted by an external site - thus no risk!

Thanks,

Ben

I think it depends on the keywords - for example "bali hotels" is a head term, but since the introduction of the hotel box on Google results its not a particularly high traffic driver any more.

Individual hotel names on the other hand aren't impacted by the hotel box, thus you tend to have the traditional Google organic results (i.e., 10 slots per page) and more opportunity to acquire decent traffic for rankings between 1-6.

Sites like hotels.com and agoda.com are pretty strong on hotel names, but rankings are so varied depending on the Google locale you're accessing.

Google are making it increasingly difficult to gain visibility in the hotel sector having also recently launched their own "hotel finder" product: http://www.google.com/hotelfinder/

In which case I guess it comes down to how impactful any disruption might be....i.e., how many links do you have built up against your existing URLs?

If there isn't many - then its probably worth taking the jump and re-writing stuff now.

Ben

1. Do you have much pre-existing link equity built up against pages on the .com?

2. Do you ever anticipate moving out of targeting a pure UK based client list?

3. Where does the majority of traffic come from today? i.e., is it mostly from the UK/where you want it to come from OR is it mostly from outside of the UK?

4. What would stop you from targeting the keywords now and reviewing performance in terms of traffic etc using the .com domain and then potentially utilising the .co.uk as a secondary measure if necessary?

Ben

I used to use the robots META tag and noindex / follow the tag generated pages, or just not use tag clouds full stop as I personally think they are a little crummy both from a user and search perspective.

I prefer flat URL structures, but I would think twice about the effort if my existing URL strings had built up some nice link equity.

When I worked at Premier Farnell for example, we went for flat URL structures without the hierarchy included, i.e., http://uk.farnell.com/d-subminiature rather than http://uk.farnell.com/connectors/d-subminiature

In my current role the URL strings are not great, but its a legacy thing before I started here: http://www.asiarooms.com/en/singapore/singapore/orchard_road.html but the site has strong link equity built up into many of the pages and I am loathed to go through another exercise of updating them and risking loss of business (even if only short term) as I suspect the benefit is probably not worth that cost.

Its a balancing act I guess.

Also, just be careful if you do decide to flatten them that you don't potentially caused duplication. For example, imagine you have duplicate categories called accessories.....you can only have 1 URL called http://ourshop.com/accessories so you might need to add some rules in to handle those correctly.

Ben

Few ways to look at it I guess...

1. PageRank is a shaky metrics to use for analysis any way.

2. Its an easily achieved, followed link simply by shedding some cash.

3. Its $149 or $299 - how does that sit vs, your marketing/link acqusition budget as a total? what is normal cost per acquisition? I don't mean in terms of buying links directly, but producing  "stuff"  that helps you to acquire them.

In essence, can you acquire as good if not better links for a lot cheaper? If so....save your money, invest it elsewhere.

If budget existed for directory listings I would still pop myself in there personally.

Do you have access to webmaster tools? If so did you receive a notification from Google informing you about unnatural links found pointing into your domain?

Are your ranking penalties site wide or tied to specific keywords and pages where you have focused heavy link building activities?

If you've just recently been hit then I suspect its entirely down to the unnatural link algo that seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. There is an excellent article on it here:

http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/

Hopefully I am understanding your question correctly here....

The main benefit of the custom 404 page aside from the obvious improvement to user experience is that you provide additional links into content that otherwise wouldn't necessarily be available to the search bots.

In essence if you just had a standard 404 error page you'd send the search bots to a dead page where their only decision would be to leave the domain and go elsewhere.

Regards setting up 301 redirects I like to associate a cost to each 301 redirect. Imagine the time it will take you or someone else to set each redirect up (say $5 per redirect). Then consider the following:

Is the URL that is 404 worth redirecting?

(1) Does it hold some residual SEO value (i.e., is it present on external sites that is driving link equity? if so can you redirect that equity to somewhere more valuable?

(2) Is the URL present on an external site driving referral traffic? if so do you have a new content page that will still match the users intent?

if the URL(s) that are 404'ing have no real link equity associated to them and/or you don't have a genuinely useful page to redirect the user to then I would just let them hit the 404 page.

If in doubt put yourself in a users boots and ask yourself if the set-up you have done would offer a valuable experience? no point redirecting a user to something totally irrelevant to the original intent - it'll just p!ss them off most the time and increase your bounce rate.

I doubt it  - 72 errors is not a lot in my opinion.I guess its relative vs. the overall size of the site in question though and the number of total pages that makes it up. If I had a site of any great size that only had 72 404 errors I would be very happy.

Does the new site have a custom 404 page? sometimes its not even worth 301 redirecting those URLs (i.e., if there isn't a natural fit for the old page on the new site or if there is no real link equity built up against those legacy URLs). A custom 404 will allow you to remove those old legacy URLs from the search index and still provide an improved route into fresh content for the search bots in the meantime.

Ultimately though I think you probably need to look deeper into the ranking drops than the 404 errors.

Best of luck with it.

Ben

I was considering doing the same thing a couple of weeks back and decided the change wasn't worth it.

1. Hyphenated URLs do generally speaking just look nicer, but how likely is that to impact things like UX or CTR rates? (unlikely). It certainly doesn't impact rankings - just do some generic searches and you'll find a real mixed bag of hyphens and underscored URLs in the listings.

2. If your underscored URLs have been around for a long time then chances are you have some link equity built up into at least some of those URLs. 301 redirecting from underscored to hyphenated versions of the same content is an  unnecessary risk to some of that link equity.

If I had a relatively new site, low traffic from organic search and no real link equity then I probably would take the plunge and update from underscores to hyphens, but it would be an almost cosmetic move based on my own personal preferences. In your case I would advise against updating the URLs unless the domain has no pre-existing equity to give up.

Ben

I am looking at potentially using some Schema mark up on hotel listing pages. This is for an OTA where lots of hotels from all over the world are available for selection (think hotels.com, booking.com, agoda.com etc)

For the itemscope itemtype on say the hotel name should I be defining it as http://schema.org/hotel or http://schema.org/localbusiness

For example against the hotel name I would have:

Grand Plaza Hanoi

I assume its the former, but I was just after some 2nd opinions.

Thanks,

Ben

I used to use the robots META tag and noindex / follow the tag generated pages, or just not use tag clouds full stop as I personally think they are a little crummy both from a user and search perspective.

Few ways to look at it I guess...

1. PageRank is a shaky metrics to use for analysis any way.

2. Its an easily achieved, followed link simply by shedding some cash.

3. Its $149 or $299 - how does that sit vs, your marketing/link acqusition budget as a total? what is normal cost per acquisition? I don't mean in terms of buying links directly, but producing  "stuff"  that helps you to acquire them.

In essence, can you acquire as good if not better links for a lot cheaper? If so....save your money, invest it elsewhere.

If budget existed for directory listings I would still pop myself in there personally.

Well I would have to disagree with that principal. Sometimes you have to think a little broader than just SEO and ask yourself if it really makes commercial sense to redirect everything.

That's why I put a financial cost against each unique redirect. At the end of the day it requires someone to action it and that person has a cost associated with their time that may be better allocated working on something that will actually drive business uplift or improve customer experience.

Each to their own of course, but I see a lot of SEO's who don't think big picture and they up using up developer resource doing stuff that then has no impact. It just p!sses people off in my experience.

What industry are you in?

Are you looking for writers to construct posts you can submit to external sites OR writers who can submit guest posts on your site?

Have you tried services like oDesk? quality can be lacking, but you could try and do a deal whereby you only pay if the post is accepted by an external site - thus no risk!

Thanks,

Ben

Makes sense - in which case the homepage might not be the best place for you.

Another option for the custom 404 which works well in certain circumstances is to add a dynamic element to it.

For example, we know the referring URL has reference to product XYZ which may now be unavailable, but perhaps we can dynamically pull in other relevant products into the 404 page.

Thats something I am looking to do with hotels that become unavailable - pull in a dynamic element to the 404 which basically recommends some other hotels close by.