

Tripadvisor dominates Google for hotel searches  - noor420
http://www.travolution.co.uk/articles/2009/04/28/2477/tripadvisor-dominates-google-for-hotel-searches.html

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webwright
I have a blog post in my head about this, and how links-as-currency is is a
really broken system. Travel sites are a great example.

Companies like TripAdvisor literally have an army of 30-40 people whose sold
job is link building and they measure how many they are able to generate per
day. They literally calculate the "cost-per-link".

So, while they are not buying text links (which Google forbids), they ARE
hurling manpower at linkbuilding in a systematic way.

So, if a link is a "vote" and Google is democratic, many SEO-centric sites
like TripAdvisor are hiring people to drag voters to the ballot box and
persuade them to vote for them.

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timcederman
I very much doubt TripAdvisor "literally" have an army of 30-40 people
dedicated to SEO.

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pskomoroch
I did an analysis on this a while back that told the same story, there is a
blog post that includes a nice visualization of the share of travel search
categories across the companies mentioned in the article:

[http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/search-competition-
tra...](http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/search-competition-travel-
sites/)

Direct link to the chart
[http://media.juiceanalytics.com/images/pattern_comparison.pn...](http://media.juiceanalytics.com/images/pattern_comparison.png)

