Travel Suppliers At Odds With Google

Google may be the 600 pound gorilla of the internet, but right now they have big trouble on their hands from travel suppliers like Marriott and American Airlines. These suppliers are asking Google to get tougher with advertisers who utilize a tactic called piggybacking.

Piggybacking in the process of advertisers using trademarks and service marks of other companies in their advertising copy. The hope is that the consumer will get confused and click on the offender's ad instead of going to the site of the real deal. The major search engines, including Google, have policies prohibiting this currently. However, they aren't very good at enforcing these policies, unless violations are brought to their attention. In fact, one of Google's own systems for generating advertising copy can create and publish ads that violate this policy. Ouch!!

It is important that as hotel suppliers we look out for this type of activity. While we alone may not be able to stop it with the help of our brand partners, we can help put pressure on Google to solve the problem. The volume of travel related search traffic is big enough that given enough pressure, Google will surely see the light and fix the problem.

Technorati Tags: Google, SEM, PPC, trademark

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Gaining Consumer Trust - Search Engines Making Ground

In this post from m-Travel's blog, Porter Gale, from Virgin America, says that the work done by search engines to reduce spam and improve the quality of pay-per-click landing pages has gone a long way to improve consumer trust in paid search engine listings.

I have to agree here. Search engines are all about providing the correct relevant content to their users whether it be from the organic or paid listings. Obviously they have made big improvements reducing the search engine spam from organic listings. They constantly refine their "secret sauce" - algorithms - to eliminate elements for manipulation whether you are talking about metatags, cloaking, keyword stuffing or paid linking. They took on paid advertising spam, when they started giving ads quality scores and requiring relevant landing pages. All of this done to improve their search results and hopefully their share of those results and the money it brings in.

Technorati Tags: search engine, ppc, landing pages, SEO, SEM

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Do We Really Need Paid Search?

This is a question I am asked frequently.  Logically to most hoteliers, when they are listed in the organic rankings on search engines and they can add content to their site for events and attractions they are targeting they don't need to pay for advertising.

This is not entirely true.  While you will generally show up high in the rankings for your brand or generic hotel terms, it is much more difficult to optimize for events and attractions.  Why because the amount of content on your site isn't going to be enough most of the time.  Additionally, you are competing against other sites which focus on local events.

Alex Vlasto on iMedia Connection gives a great explanation about why there needs to be a mix between paid and organic search.

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