for example take your location and reviews and type it into google and see which hotel is mentioned as the first tripadvisor listing. If its yours then great and if its not well this is your opportunity to change that.

So my recommendation would be to make an image of your tripadvisor badge and link back to your own tripadvisor page with the keywords that benefit you

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.

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.

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.

———————–

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

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. =)

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!