Following up the article found on Travolution, Hilton might be one of several hotel brands affected by this change about the right for any company to bid on trademarks names.
Funny enough, when you type Novotel on Google, Hilton doesn't appear on paid listings...
VideoAgency, the company behind Trivop (a leading online videoguide for hotels), has revamped its website and concentrates now on 3 task:
- Video Production
- Video Search Engine Production (see the video interview with Marc Robertson from Reelseo)
- Digital Asset Management or how to manage your videos to many video portals like Metacafe, YouTube, Dailymotion
Video Agency CEO, Thomas Owadenko, has also launched its blog full of info and videos.
Some of few may have noticed some changes in the way results come up with your search on Google.
One big change is that more and more multimedia like pictures or videos come back as results alongside links to relevant websites. Results come from other search tools like Google News or Google Books or YouTube and so on.
Another big change - which is at this stage more applicable to our industry - is the creation of deeplinks results towards key divisions of your website (see example below and click on the pictures to enlarge their size). And also a search tab within your website which should make the results more accurate.
Does Starwood Hotels pays for this listing, probably not since it is on organic results (not paid listing). Having said that if you come back the initial page, you can see there are not sponsored links at all on the brand Starwood Hotels. Probably because Google cannot allow anymore competitor of the chain to bid on these key words on their PPC campaign. But if you look at the 2nd page results, you will see quite a lot of advertizers on the right side (Accor Hotels, Venere, Planigo...).
These are key changes in the way Google Search works. I am sure this is still in testing but I thought I would share with you my findings.
Thanks for your input, any more suggestions are welcome...
If you want to submit other examples, feel free to add on the comments box...
I was searching randomly on Technorati ("the" blog search engine) to see if there were any blogs talking about the latest Business Travel Show held in London last week. The relevancy of the results is really really poor and I have serious doubts whether this is still a good search engine to use.
What about you?
Are you feeling the same?
Are you still interested by the Travel Blogs Ranking update ?
The UK version of SideStep has integrated Bed & Breakfasts in their accomodation meta search engine. I am puzzled to understand how they differentiate hotels from bed & breakfast. Unfortunately I can't show you any screen shots as I can' t replicate what I have seen yesterday. I guess only a limited number of people have access to this new product. They must do a soft launch with a small percentage of their traffic accesing the new features. SideStep has alos added a funcionality where you can recall you last searches. Quite convenient to save time.
Technorati Tags: sidestep, bedandbreakfasts, hotels, search engine
In the past 12 months, a lot of new entrants have embraced Web 2.0 functionalities in Travel. Quite a few have called their venture Tripsomething to a point that we became confused with their name (TripUp, TripHub, TripIt...). It that because the most popular Web 2.0 travel company is TripAdvisor?
Anyway, SideStep decided to acquire one of them - TripUp - for an undisclosed sum. Does is anyone have any idea of the amount of the transaction? I am quite surprised for such an acquisition. The company has been runnning for less than a year. The website is still in its infancy and shows "beta" on the homepage. I am not sure they have shown any decent revenue stream yet. But SideStep thought there would be some nice synergies between the 2 companies with their 6 million monthly visitors comparing prices.
TripUp is another travel social networking site which connects thousands of travellers all around the world. The website allows to share to your community your travel blog, maps, videos, photos and reviews. Check out the videos provided by the travellers here.
I haven't personnaly tried this product yet. You? I will give it a try over the week end.
Technorati Tags: tripup, sidestep, rob salomon, meta search engine, travel social networking
I have been using Twitter (if you don't know Twitter, find some explanation here) for less than a month now. I really like this new online tool. It's so easy and you don't need Internet access to update your community.
Also it is very search engine friendly. Remember my quest to feature #1 on Google with the search terms "hotel blogs". Well HB still feature #'1 and now Twitter.com/HotelBlogs is ranked #8. It took nearly 1 year to have my blog listed on Google and less than a month with Twitter...
Technorati Tags: hotel blogs, twitter
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I am back. It was good to stay away from the computer and the Internet in the last 3 days for a change...
Just to let you know that there won't be anymore more "Make it #1 on Google" post like I used to do on every Monday. The reason being is I made #1 last Thursday.
See you all tomorrow...
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