I think, in large part, that's why I decided to put the bb.com and TA review widgets on my own website. Visitors don't have to leave to read our reviews and about 80% of site visitors do go to that page.
The TA widget is a piece of $%^# though, and only works about 1/3 of the time..
Little Blue said:
I think, in large part, that's why I decided to put the bb.com and TA review widgets on my own website. Visitors don't have to leave to read our reviews and about 80% of site visitors do go to that page.
The TA widget is a piece of $%^# though, and only works about 1/3 of the time.
You hit it on the head right there. All these things to take guests OFF your website, I would like to warn all innkeepers - keep them ON your website, even populating new windows can be tricky. All those "link love" requests I think can hurt your bottom line. I need to reevaluate what I have on our website and stop some of those outgoing links...
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All these things to take guests OFF your website, I would like to warn all innkeepers - keep them ON your website,
There is a caveat though. Your site is judged both by search engines and humans in terms of who you link to. Link to nothing and there is nothing for that portion of the score.
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I think swirt has it backwards - for SEO you want links TO your website. The links you provide to TripAdvisor by putting a widget or other link on your site, helps TripAdvisor's SEO, not yours.
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I think swirt has it backwards - for SEO you want links TO your website. The links you provide to TripAdvisor by putting a widget or other link on your site, helps TripAdvisor's SEO, not yours.
Not backwards, I just take into account ALL of the factors involved rather than just one of them. Yes you want incoming links to your site. You also need outgoing links. There are no "authority sites" with no outgoing links (well...except for Google). Look at the top B&B websites, according to the search engines, for any given region and you will find that one feature they have is quality outbound links.
Link to crap, get judged as crap. Link to quality, get judged as quality. (still not convinced, put 20 links on your home page to some of the raunchiest sites on the web and watch what happens to your performance in the search engines.)
The other major difference is that you are judged more critically on who you link to than who links to you. Example: 20 raunchy sites can link to you and not hurt you in any way (in terms of SEO) as long as they were not paid links. The general idea being that some other site can't do anything to hurt your site. However, if you link to 20 raunchy sites, since you have control over those links, they can be held against you.
My comment to Joe Bloggs was not specific to the TripAdvisor widget. It was more broad to the concern of going though his site and ripping out the outgoing links.
You are a bit correct in that the TripAdvisor widget may help tripadvisor's seo. Though the links to tripadvisor through the widget are all come from a standardized javascript pulled from tripadvisor. Google can crawl javascript, but in most case chooses not to. If it did choose to in this case it would spot the footrpint left by the widget and likely discount it. In the event that it didn't and actually did give some tiny seo benefit to TA it would also give that benefit to the property's review (since the links go there directly) so it could help you as long as the review is good.
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