- Hotel websites and Google - Times Tavel article
- Posted by Mark Goodge on March 11th, 2006
There's an article in the Travel section of The Times today, in which
the writer bemoans the fact that it's hard to find individual hotel
websites via Google - instead, the top results are nearly all
meta-sites or booking agencies. You can read the article at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspap...078368,00.html
The article gives to examples of two hotel sites that the author tried
to find:
1. The Zanzibar Hotel in the UK - www.zanzibarhotel.co.uk
2. The Amphone Hotel in the Czech Republic - www.amphone.cz
Maybe readers of these newsgroups would care to take a look at these
sites and come up with some reasons why they don't rank highly in the
search engines. I found plenty...
Mark
--
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Listen: http://www.goodge.co.uk/files/dweeb.mp3 - you'll love it!
- Posted by Gordon Hudson on March 11th, 2006
"Mark Goodge" <usenet@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9lb612dmm20jtsgderjfgdhpem444d1vri@news.marks house.net...
Its not just hotels, its theatres as well.
A lot of those are down to content management systems.
However, some of its down to the way we search.
In the old days directoroes were used as well as web crawlers.
Until recently Google put the DMOZ top few in their results
and those were more likley to give precedence to official sites.
--
Gordon Hudson || Hostroute.com Ltd
e-mail:ghudson [at] hostroute.net
http://www.hostroute.com/resellers Host 5 web sites for $9 per month
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- Posted by SmakDaddy on March 11th, 2006
"Mark Goodge" <usenet@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9lb612dmm20jtsgderjfgdhpem444d1vri@news.marks house.net...
They both suck?
They're not search engine optimized worth a crap?
Besides, the article may have been in the Times today, but it's content has
been an issue FOREVER with Google, and probably always will be.
- Posted by Jim Ley on March 11th, 2006
On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:18:26 +0000, Mark Goodge
<usenet@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk> wrote:
The thing is they would struggle even appropriately authored, the meta
sites will have lots of links - and they are generally careful to not
link to the specific hotel site, it's not simply an authoring issue -
although authoring will get you better.
Jim.
- Posted by Matt Probert on March 12th, 2006
On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:26:39 -0800, "SmakDaddy" <smak@> wrote:
Now that's a profound and worrying statement.
A half-way decent search engine should work FOR and on behalf of the
reader wishing to find data. But in true IT fashion the nerds have
turned this around so that the tail is now wagging the dog - sites
must work FOR the search engines.
To quote Johnny Rotten;
"Ever got the feeling you've been had?"
Matt
- Posted by Mark Goodge on March 12th, 2006
On Sun, 12 Mar 2006 07:50:23 GMT, Matt Probert put finger to keyboard
and typed:
But how does the search engine know which sites the user wishes to
find?
And, in this particlar context, how can a search engine direct users
to a site where the majority of the content is invisible to the search
spider?
Mark
--
Visit: http://www.OrangeHedgehog.com - Useful stuff for the web
Listen: http://www.goodge.co.uk/files/dweeb.mp3 - you'll love it!
- Posted by Nick Kew on March 12th, 2006
Matt Probert wrote:
A halfway-decent website should work FOR and on behalf of the reader
looking for information. But in true marketing fashion the luvvies
have turned this around so that the tail is now wagging the dog -
visitors must work FOR the site deezyners.
Of course, a site that is visitor-friendly is also
search-engine-friendly. It presents *relevant information*
to both, without discrimination.
Oh, and nothing new there. I could've said the same ten years
ago. The main difference is that google now is hugely better
than yahoo ever was. And though we had altavista doing a
relatively decent job ten years ago, it was not them but
yahoo that got all the meeja attention outside core geekdom.
--
Nick Kew
- Posted by Tony on March 14th, 2006
"Jim Ley" <jim@jibbering.com> wrote in message
news:44133b2a.524656756@news.individual.net...
A search for "Amphone" gets there quite easily in two steps. The first step
is to an obvious site that comes up fourth, the second is just as easy. I
would expect that because "amphone" is in the URL.
Zanzibar Hotel is much more difficult. If I were Google, I would think that
the searcher was looking for a hotel in Zanzibar, of which there are of
course lots, together with the usual class timewasters who put up their
hands to the question without knowing the answer. Putting the search in
quotes doesn't help a lot because Google cleverly includes plurals, so you
get all the sites advertising Zanzibar hotels. Adding "-hotels" at least
gets you to lots of hotels with the right name. That leads to understanding
the real problem: there are just too many hotels with the same name. Not
really Google's fault I think. Even the mythical Do What I Mean computer
might find that a challenge.
This is of course aside from the sites themselves - no doubt a bit of
relevant text content in English would help!
--
Tony W
My e-mail address has no hyphen
- but please don't use it, reply to the group.
