Screen Pilot Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Google Hotel Finder is Here to Stay

Digital Marketing — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:38:20 -0000

COOL! !!!!. Thanks for sharing very interesting.

Re: Google Hotel Finder is Here to Stay

screenpilot — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:29:30 -0000

Hi Matt,
I would say it's difficult to predict whether hotels and resort will eventually get to include their own prices and links to their booking engines. I believe the delay is political as it provides a prominent place for the OTAs to rank and Google to partner with these companies that it already has a relationship with rather than developing a whole new platform for hotels to include their own links and offers within the Hotel Finder. Thanks for the great questions.

Re: Google Hotel Finder is Here to Stay

Matt Chantry — Wed, 02 May 2012 10:53:46 -0000

What do you think the chances are Google eventually allows hotels and resorts to include their own prices and links to their booking engine on the Hotel Finder tool. Is the delay on it a technical or a political (i.e. the OTA's don't want that to happen) issue?

Re: An Introduction To Multi Channel Analytics For Hotels & Resorts

Matt Chantry — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:55:14 -0000

Completely agree John. But creating that initial awareness is the most vital part of the journey and multi-channel allows you to gauge which specific sources are the most value for creating that awareness.

Re: An Introduction To Multi Channel Analytics For Hotels & Resorts

John Mcauliffe — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:12:24 -0000

this is great... and a long way from the traditional "last click" attribution mentality that has plagued the industry... but it still doesn't take into consideration the full shopping journey. Research (actually research conducted by Google) has show that travel shoppers visit 20+ sites and do 12 different searches over a 30 day period before booking travel. They shop on OTAs (Expedia, Travelocity, etc.), travel review sites (TripAdvisor, etc.), travel research sites (Frommers, etc.), etc. Each one of these channels attributes to the sale in different ways and at different stages. Marketers should strive to better understand the full shopping journey and then associate attribution modeling appropriately.

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

JonGarciano — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:58:19 -0000

I think it is safe to say now (in February of 2012) that the emergence of Google + is without question, the reason behind the dropping of citation visibility and links from Google Places.

It makes perfect sense when you consider how badly Google has screwed up in its past forays into the social media scene. It now realises that user-engagement is a wonderful thing - especially if you control it!

Mind you, it doesn't stop the spamming activity that was rife with so-called "customer reviews". As an industry participant (in the SEO industry) I have lost count of the amount of offers I used to received from third-world SEO sweat shops "to create customer citations on Yelp" for me! While that opportunity has disappeared, it still doesn't stop those same individuals from creating "Google-User" reviews on Google+ (via VPN proxies).

On balance though, I am in favour of the dropping of the "user reviews" from Google Places - they just seemed to lack integrity in too many cases.

Tender writing specialist

Re: Living in a Virtual World – Google Virtual Tours

text sms marketing — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:17:43 -0000

mobile
future of mobile technology is bright.

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Tellus Self Storage — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:59:14 -0000

Crazy stuff, why did they remove the 'Details' section from Places?? It seems like that would add to the users experience, now our customers are left guessing what our business does.

Re: Google Launches Hotel Finder

Hotel Finder — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:41:58 -0000

Great observation on Google`s hotel finder. One thing is that the Google is trying to make money in every niche. Thanks

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Cheap seo — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:25:04 -0000

Its look like a permanent change and i am sure business owners going to get real reviews from owner.The interesting fact here ,The customers can write anything in the review.I hope you guys understood what I mean . So let us see what google is going to do this year.Watching more changes from Google God.

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Linkbuildr — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:24:26 -0000

I was thinking this wouldn't have taken place so quickly either...crazy! I've been seeing the +1'd content in my SERPs in Canada, so they're definitely quick to get the influences going.

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Tom Dibble — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:29:20 -0000

Feels kinda good to be the first to have broken this news it seems on the dub dub dub.

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Matt Chantry — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:08:55 -0000

Looks like its a permanent change. Here's a quote from G themselves on the news: “Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we’ve heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages.”

Re: Google kills 95% of your Google Places hotel reviews. What does it mean for SEO?

Tom Dibble — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:38:00 -0000

I figured this would happen at some point in the future but not so soon. What makes this interesting is that they did it so soon after the launch of +1 and seeming lack of contribution from the Google user base with their review volumes. The latter to me speaks to the influence that +1 will have on brands and content in the coming months. This is either a "oops" mistake on G's part and since we seem to have found it first, it will be interesting to see if it's rolled back or not. If it isn't, best start getting those +1's going and GReviews generated!

Re: Is Popularity in Social Media a Good Measure of Influence?

adam_hartung — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:56:23 -0000

Interesting article.

Check out my blog at:

www.thephoenixprinciple.com

to continue exploring why Facebook, Twitter and other social media marketing tactics are the new water cooler for Word-Of-Mouth Marketing.

Adam Hartung

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

TomD — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:18:20 -0000

Must admit, as a firm that deals with online direct distribution for our clients, we whole hardheartedly agree. For what at the time they are charging for said listings, it's crazy not to think that they might give a bit away!

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

TomD — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:16:06 -0000

Hi Phil,

Yes, TA were quick to realize that a perceived "hey look at our reviews on TA" would be a hit with a lot of the hospitality world that weren't 'boxes' and of course the inbound links that all these sites then gave them helped push TA in the early days. To some degree indeed still do based on normal algorithmic assumptions.

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

TomD — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:14:01 -0000

Yes, but in this case you would not technically be paying for such a link. It would be considered a value add of the commercial transaction and hence open to interpretation and discussions between TA and Google.

Re: The Value of Social Media and How To Evaluate

Emma — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:20:29 -0000

Great post. It can be very tough to justify social media efforts and you offer several really good ways to measure success.

Re: Bing Organic Results In Yahoo: Impact & Tips

Andy @ FirstFound — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:16:29 -0000

Thanks for those. Do the webmaster tools provide any advantages over Google tools?

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

Neelante — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:37:55 -0000

My technical knowledge is very limited but all I can tell you is that in 6 months of having a business listing on Tripadvisor we have not received one direct, linked enquiry as a result. (And we are the #1 hotel in their popularity listing for our country).

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

nadia hardie — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:44:34 -0000

Thanks for this info. Found it really helpful considering we were exploring the issue of whether to pay for a business listing or not for this very reason. Cheers!

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

marghe — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:57:00 -0000

Is it not true that paying for and selling links is against Google guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results?
To me, it seems obvious that the link has a "nofollow" tag...
what do you think?

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

Phil At TripAdvisorWatch — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:19:04 -0000

It doesn't surprise me, but it was remiss of me not to have thought of exposing this myself - thanks for doing the work for me!

I also suspect that many owners who put TA widgets on their sites don't realise that they are giving TA a keyword-rich link at the same time :
http://tripadvisorwatch.wordpr...

All one-way traffic!

Phil

Re: TripAdvisor.com: Do Their Business Listings Have Any SEO Value?

Jay Karen — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:35:45 -0000

You fail to mention the possible reason TripAdvisor has made these Business Listing links "no follow" links...they too compete in SEO with the thousands of properties on their site. Giving "link juice" to their properties would possibly conflict with their own SEO strategy. Google the name of just about any property, and you'll find their TripAdvisor review page up there on page 1 of Googlee right along with the property's own web site. They don't want to aide and abet the competition by giving them "link juice." And the TripAdvisor badges and review widgets used by many properties provide many links back to TripAdvisor, thereby giving TripAdvisor more SEO love for the very key words that the properties try leveraging.

They are an internet marketing company competing in a highly-competitive marketplace. It's hard to knock them for trying to keep a leg up.

I told them at their office a couple of weeks ago that if they removed the no-follow code, they could earn a lot of good will and possibly even more customers. But I do understand the nature of the conflict of interest in doing so. We'll see. There are some pretty smart cookies over in Newton, MA.