Having done a fair amount of marketing for various hotels, I’ve dealt with TripAdvisor often enough to have a pretty strong opinion about appropriate ways to interact with TripAdvisor. We’ve seen a number of clients take different approaches to implementing their own TripAdvisor stats into hotel websites and we often recommend against the practice. Today, I want to touch on the topic of why utilizing the TripAdvisor widget can possibly hurt your business with regards to both the impact it can have on your traffic and more importantly, your conversion rate. We’ll also briefly cover a few different ways for hotels to promote a good TripAdvisor ranking while minimizing or completely removing the harmful side-effects.
Helping TripAdvisor to ‘Own’ Your Brand Name
Go ahead and search for almost any hotel name on almost any search engine and you’ll probably notice that TripAdvisor.com appears in one of the first three spots. This not-so-gentle giant has done a brilliant job at competing with and sometimes even outranking hotels for searches related to THEIR OWN BRAND NAMES in the SERPs. As a result, it has become almost as important to have a good TripAdvisor rating as it is to rank well for keywords related to their hotel.
As with any search-saavy company, TripAdvisor has embedded somewhat ‘hidden’ SEO strategies in many of their product offerings, the most effective of which seems to be the infamous “free widget.” If you have been to any hotel’s website in the past few years, you’ve probably seen at least one variation of the widget. Most of the “free widgets” offered have a couple SEO friendly (for them!) things in common.
First, most of TripAdvisor’s wonderful widgets include a keyword-rich text link back to the hotel’s main listing on TripAdvisor. How does this help TripAdvisor? It provides a keyword-rich deep link using the hotel’s brand name, further improving the chances that TripAdvisor will rank highly for searches related to that hotel’s name. To be clear: Linking to TripAdvisor from your homepage, site-wide or wherever you choose display that widget helps improve the chances that TripAdvisor will compete with you for searches related to your own brand name. Additionally, the sheer volume of additional links which comes from these widgets continue to support TripAdvisor’s search domination of location specific keyword phrases.
“But I want to promote the fact that my hotel is one of the highest ranked hotels on TripAdvisor!”
Hooray for you! But highest ranked or not, using their standard widget can cause you to lose traffic to TripAdvisor by providing a link to their website. Once visitors click off your site through that link, they will be presented with a number of ads from your competitors and other travel agencies. By providing a link to your TripAdvisor page, you’re basically sending your own hard-earned website traffic to TripAdvisor will little chance of getting them back to book.
What can you do to promote your great TripAdvisor reviews without hurting your business?
- Good solution – Create your own image promotion which promotes your TripAdvisor prowess and make sure that it doesn’t link to TripAdvisor’s website. This solution is recommended for any hotel with a very good TripAdvisor rating.
- Another good solution – Don’t mention TripAdvisor at all. If your TripAdvisor reviews cause you to sit up and cry at night, it should be fairly obvious that the best move is to avoid the subject completely by saying NOTHING about TripAdvisor on your website.
- A mediocre solution [Updated] – Use an iframe to display your widget and disallow (robots.txt) the widget file for all search engines – If for some reason your hands are bound by corporate nonsense and you can’t talk sense into your superiors, this solution will make them happy and, at the same time, will tell the search engines not to pass link credit on to TripAdvisor. Note: Users will not know the difference and will still be able to leave your website to visit TripAdvisor.
While you alone cannot completely control TripAdvisor’s search impact on your business or even its ranking for your brand name, you can certainly have some impact. Think globally, act locally and help prevent TripAdvisor from controlling your hotel’s future!
Tags: hotel marketing, SEO, tripadvisor
Comment By: Phil Graham, a B&B owner in Normandy
March 27th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ve been banging on this line for ages, TA widget’s are NOT a free gift to promote your hotel, they are a means of promoting TripAdvisor. I’m happy with our reviews on TA, but am deeply suspicious of the site’s invidious, creeping menace!
Comment By: Derek Pennycook
March 27th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
excellent article.
Tripadvisor is quickly pushing long established websites of independent B&Bs, guest house and hotels off the front pages of search engines.
Your article is making them aware that they are promoting their own departure from the search results.
Comment By: Stu Bradley
April 6th, 2010 at 12:27 pm
It’s about time we all recognised the potential world takeover bid by Tripadvisor! Great article – spread the word!
Comment By: Andrej
April 6th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I’ve experimented a bit with Tripadvisor widgets and was under the impression it was not possible to add nofollow to it? I thought the widget stops displaying if you edit the code. Are there any examples of the ‘mediocre solution’ in action?
Comment By: Rick
April 16th, 2010 at 11:38 am
@Andrej. Thanks for the comment. You caught me being over-theoretical…
We can’t find a way to nofollow the the widget either. Plus, it turns out that we’d be breaking TA’s terms and conditions.
Instead, we’re updating the post to recommend the following:
Instead of nofollowing the link, iframe the entire widget with the source page being located in a directory that is disallowed in your robots.txt file. This method takes a little more work but pretty much keeps the SE’s from seeing the link.
Thanks again!
Comment By: @hhotelconsult
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I am adding this to my weekly piece, once again. I also realized something MAJOR…
if people link from your page to Tripadvisor, it’s likely driving bookings through Expedia. That’s 25% more than if you could have kept them on your page. FML. =)
Comment By: @hhotelconsult
May 5th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
This is tripadvisor’s comment… OP what are your thoughts? I posted this in their forum, and a staff member replied fairly quick. Nice to see customer service happening at some of these bigger groups.
———————–
Thank you for your post.
Google and other search engines prefer to display a property’s actual website above TripAdvisor, or any other site, in the search results. Your comments about the links in our badges overestimate the power of a single link and overlook the fact that thousands of businesses use these products because they represent a stamp of approval from the world’s largest travel community.
We do realize that search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for websites and raises many questions, which is why we created a guide to the basics of optimizing your site for search. The guide contains useful tips & advice on improving your search rankings, and we encourage any business with a website to have a look.
You can find the guide here: cdn.tripadvisor.com/pdfs/SEO_Strategies.pdf
Comment By: Rick
May 10th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
@hhotelconsult Thanks for the comment.
Regarding ‘overestimating the power of one link’: Isn’t that the same as saying there’s no reason to vote because your one vote won’t make a difference? I still vote and I’m going to continue doing every ‘little’ thing I can to keep the SEO game fair.
Regarding the SEO guide: I happen to think their SEO guide is another brilliant seo move. What better way to get keyword-optimized websites to link to you and further strengthen the them of your website then to guide the websites that are going to link to you in optimization.
Maybe if TripAdvisor offered a follow, direct backlink to hotels I’d believe their good intentions.
A combination of great PR (public relations) and dare I say, trickery, has helped to strengthen TripAdvisor’s grip on the travel industry.
Comment By: Dillinger
July 1st, 2010 at 7:29 am
I have hacked the widget and have now got an icon and a non link that still says I am No.1 for my City. Without giving any link juice to TA.com
Code …
TripAdvisor Popularity Index
#1 Hotel in City, Country
… /code
BTW … the are mine … put this how you want it yourself.
I even got a little extra SEO with my alt tags.
Neat.
Comment By: Dillinger
July 1st, 2010 at 7:33 am
Ha ha … sorry it does not display the code.
Basically what I did, was to just use <img src= for the icon and add the script from TA but take away the <a href= bit.
Add an alt=Miami Hotel (or whatever) tag to the TA icon and use TA for YOUR benefit.