WebReservations International is a well know actor of the online travel industry. They bought the famous Worldres in 2005 and is now at the head of the following major online brands: hostelworld.com, worldres.com, hostels.com and trav.com. Hostelworld provides the hostels product of RyanAir’s website (whereas Expedia provides the hotel product).

Web Reservations International CEO and Co-Founder, Ray Nolan, stated in January 2007 that “Google throws you the Yellow Pages and says go find it yourself“. Ray Nolan also had good things to say about the aggregators, stating: “For any one destination, there are probably only 10 places you really want to stay, but the aggregators will make you go through 20 pages of hotels”.

As far as we know the new website (whose name has not been revealed yet) will be a fusion of social networking, travel information (with a system of reviews) and online booking system. It has been rumored that investment for this project might be as high as €30million. WRI planned to launch the website on Wednesday (tomorrow), back up with a large marketing budget.

I can’t wait to see this new product; at least on the paper the new website looks quite challenging! I hope it will meet my our expectations… Stay tunned.

Via Sunday Business Post
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Directory Free

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• AC Hotels has been banned from Google!

A lot of companies do not have a clue why they have been banned or penalized from Google index. That’s why I will approach the case of “AC HOTELS” from different angles that respect the following assumption: “Banned from Google= Not Spidered, Not Ranked, Not Indexed”

• Are they still present in Google index?

Let’s see if AC HOTELS website is still indexed in google database with the simple command site:www.ac-hotels.com (same thing for the second website site:www.ac-hoteles.com)

As you can see (click the link for a bigger image) the response from Google is negative. Google does not have information about those sites besides (part of) their backlinks.

• Are still present in Yahoo and Msn?

Having a look at (the highly recommended) Yahoo “Site Explorer“, the same type of query reveals that their two official websites are indexed and it also gives us a list of all their backlinks (=inlinks).

Yahoo Site Explorer says:

• AC-Hotels.com: Pages indexed: 26 / Inlinks for this url only (except from this domain): 2,576
• AC-Hoteles.com: Pages indexed: 9 / Inlinks for this url only (except from this domain): 2,001

Msn Search says:

• AC-Hotels.com: 16 pages / 4,533 Inlinks
• AC-Hoteles.com: 20 pages / 1,176 Inlinks

This screenshot shows us that there are very few pages of AC Hotels indexed in Yahoo and MSN (some of them do not exist anymore) . The good is that Yahoo gives us more information about the backlinks network of the site; this information is helpful in order to understand the “banning issue”. It really seems that Google, for its part, has decided not to index those 2 domains anymore for some reasons.

Why AC Hotels website has been banned by Google?

First of all let’s have a look at the 2 websites carefully.

It doesn’t take long to understand that the 2 sites are not “SEO friendly“! Indeed there are both developed with the exact same structure using Flash! This is a basic mistake of websites that totally rely on flash. Flash may look good for the visitors, but unfortunately Search Engine Spiders (automated crawlers like googlebot) are still not able to read precisely (or browse easily) Flash content. In this case googlebot does not see anything, not a single link or word.

Note: Google is able to read flash BUT it needs advanced SEO techniques to be able to position well a flash site in search engines. Most of the time webmasters reproduce the entire website in pure html “behind” the flash content just for the love of spider bots.

If Google missed the Flash content, it did not miss the Meta Keywords and Meta tags proposed by the page that loads the flash; keywords and meta descriptions are shown below:

Note: Those are the exact same keywords and meta descriptions for the two sites that also have the exact same title: “AC Hotels: Hoteles AC en España, Italia y Portugal”

Note2: It seems that AC Hotels is currently making changes to their sites, the Meta Description has been reduced as shown below:

So guess what: Google sees all those keywords in the meta tags but unfortunately the spider is not able to locate any occurrence of those keywords in the content of the website (it’s a big no no!). People who put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site are severely penalized by Google.

The same applies for the following subdomains that redirect the visitors to the same flash frame with different keywords but still with no content for the spiders:

hoteles.barcelona.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.granada.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.madrid.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.sevilla.ac-hotels.com

A quick look at Alexa tells us that 4% of the traffic comes from directorio.ac-hotels.com. This subdomain does not use any flash file; it is a basic directory of hotels that spiders will sure understand and indexed. The use of the directory is obvious! There is no browsable sitemap on the rest of the site, thus there was a real need to optimize and help users (and spiders) to find the right path to the content. Interlinking webpages is not an abuse if it is done properly; according to Google it can be done if it really helps to guide the visitors to navigate the website..

Now let’s have a look at the IP who hosts those 2 main websites of AC Hotels. A reverse IP lookup gives us the full list of domain names hosted by the same IP; a total of 92 domain names all owned by AC Hotels.

A quick overview of those websites brought to my attention the fact that they all have the exact same structure, with a flash integrated into a frame and a background that are both hosted on www.Ac-hotels.com Same approach, same results! Spiders can’t crawl the content of the sites thus almost none of those sites is indexed in Google. I said “almost” because hotelcuzco.net is the only site from the 92 that is still indexed by google…

Is there any duplicated content? Indeed and it is a major SEO error; Ac-hotels.com, org, biz, info Ac-hoteles.com, net, org, biz, info and ac10hotels.com have the exact same content (meta keywords, description, content)! Ac-hotels.com has been penalized for not being able to determine a central main site inside a network of domain names to the eyes of search engines. For google it is duplicated content as Google think people intends to position as many webpages as possible in the pages of results to get better visibility. Also, the website of each hotel from the chain get the exact same structure and link back to Ac-hotels.com. That explains why every single hotel website has been penalized too.

Solutions?: Using the permanent 301 redirections on those 10 sites to the main site; and providing a different readable structure of each website, so Googlebot can notice they are indeed all different.

As a matter of fact Google intensively struggle against duplicated content since the beginning of 2006 and those 10 websites are no exception in Googlebot’s eyes.

Page rank? Even if google does not indexed anymore AC-Hotels.com, the domain name still has a Page Rank of 6/10 and a page rank of 4/10 for the asp page that run the Flash content. Usually Page Rank updates take a lot of time, so we can easily predicts that next update will show a 0/10.

AC-Hotels.com’s websites still have backlinks and still have a PR (as of 19/3/07) ; however we saw a lot of indicators that explain why Google algorithm has taken the decision to ban or penalize AC Hotels’ websites (duplicated content between domains, keywords stuffing, no spider friendly content, excessive inbounds linking from the same IP etc).

I would advise AC-Hotels to correct every single problems as fast as they can so they can then quickly file a reinclusion request to Google to be able to enjoy again traffic from a organic results. In my opinion there were no intention from AC Hotels to misbehave abusing SEO techniques but one may ask: Where is the boundary between optimization and SEO abuses? That’s a question SEO companies keep on asking themselves, and that’s why we pay them for.

PS: AC-Hotels can still count on other domain names to drive traffic from Google. Those domain names have a different design and are registered under a different IP. They are indexed by Google.

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• AC Hotels and Google – A learning experience
• Web Reservations International to launch a “revolutionary” travel website!
• New Google feature: Local Business Centre

How does it work? Well it is quite simple, you simply have to register to the Google Local Business Centre, entering the details of your business, the category, phone number etc. You can also specify the operating business hours. It is totally free and google verifies your info via postcard! Once you have received the postcard from google, you will get a pin number that will be used to activate your account.

You can register your hotel, or travel agency right here: Google’s Local Business Centre

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• Yet another google mashup, on Tripadvisor.com

I hope it will be available in more countries and more cities (not just for the US). That’s funny to see that Tripadvisor only displays the average price of the hotel for the dates selected, they have chosen not to enter into the war of the aggregators that compare travel retail sites between them to retrieve and publish the best price found for each hotel..

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“The final 10 is, we believe, a collection of the finest thinkers and strategists since 1996, and sometimes those just simply brave enough to try to break new ground.”

Here are 5 people selected from the list of the 10 most influential people:

• Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google

• Barry Diller, InterActive Corp/Expedia

• Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane-Fox, Lastminute.com

• Stelios Haji-Ioannou, EasyJet

• Steve Kaufer and Langley Steinert, TripAdvisor

If you want to know who else appear on the list and WHY they appear in that list, Travolution provides an analisys/rationale.

Pierre Chappaz (and Dominique Vidal Kelkoo) did not make it to the final ranking of the 10 most influential person but was present among the 20 most influential people; see the others on Travolution.
The next big question is: Who will remain in the list in 2016? Will Google not only influence but play a more determinant role in the travel industry in the future?

Do you agree/disagree with this ranking? Have a read at the analysis page and make a comment.
* “Travolution is a new media brand for the online travel industry, from the publishers of Gazetteers Plus & Travel Weekly. It is packed with research, news and analysis on everything to do with selling, deploying and marketing travel on the web.”

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Basically it consists of placing a button on a webpage to allow the internet user to be called back for free immediately. The technology being involved is VoIP (Voice over IP).

Let’s take a concrete example: Imagine you are confused with the cancellation policy of a hotel just before you validate your booking online. You will probably stop the process until you have a clearer idea of the policy (or maybe you will book somewhere else). Now imagine you find a button on this page saying that if you provide your phone number (that will remain private) you will get an immediate phone call from the hotel to support you for free..

I like the way new technologies influence the hotel industry (travel industry in general) but I clearly think that a mix of those new technologies backed up with a good old phone call simply does the trick.

Now let’s return to the main subject; Google has launched a Click2call feature for its advertising program. It will add a small telephone icon to the ads and will connect you with the company that advertises on google. Not a revolutionary feature since Miva already created this type of feature for its ads program (see a good demo here), but considering that Google benefit from an incredible online buzz, and since I never mentioned (on this site) this kind of features then it is the right time for me to cover the topic and spread the word.

If you want to try a live demo of google Click-to-call, it is currently being tested in the UK see this basic faq. (if not living in the UK just add a proxy address located in the UK to your Internet Explorer properties and type “artisan hotel” on google.co.uk).

By the way Skype (now belonging to Ebay) powers this feature; concerning Yahoo UK, it has launched in Europe its click-to-call feature in August powered by eStara.

Source of the pictures:
http://davideichholtzer.blog.lemonde.fr/davideichholtzer/2006/09/clicktocall_goo.html

Related posts:

• Web Reservations International to launch a “revolutionary” travel website!
• AC Hotels has been banned from Google!
• New Google feature: Local Business Centre