Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs

[IM_Learner]

Hello,

I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some.

The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved?

Regards

[Shawn_Huber]

Being in the travel industry these are the same observations that I've noticed.

My theory behind a few of them:

• EMD - they use "cheap" and "air" or "travel" in the domain. I know that this was to be less effective, but like you stated they still rank well.
• Content is scraped - I've come across some of these sites that have actually taken our content and then outrank us.
• Actual brands haven't done a good enough job trying to rank for similar terms. Think about Ask.com or e-how.com, they rank not because they do a great job, but because no one else has anything better so Google is forced to rank them.

For your second question, I know one online travel agency put in a lot of money and time to create dynamic style pages when searching for flights between city 1 and city 2. You can alter the URL by changing the airport code and city name and the copy within that page remains the same with the exception of the city names.  There are companies as well that will build out the actual pages with any desired URL structure you would want.

[StreamMarket]

Hi,

As you all know Google is on spree of Algorithm updates from last few years, sooner or later every website on web will be effected that is using wrong ways to get ranked, which is against Google Policies.

Thanks

[IM_Learner]

Thanks for the replay Shawn! Can you please guide how this is done? I mean these are the dynamic pages with no or less content then how come they get indexed in Google and then ranked?

[Shawn_Huber]

The underlying thing is that they are the few sites that are doing it, so in the absence of a better option, Google shows these sites instead. Think of ehow.com or ask.com, they don't provide a great experience to the user, but you will notice on those types of searches, there are not any better options out there.

When I say dynamic, I don't mean it as it is created on the fly. The URL has parameters that the server sees and knows to fetch the corresponding city from the server. I am not 100% positive, but from past experience I am willing to bet there is some kind of auto-fill tag like %CITY% that the server will plug in the city from the URL parameter. The rest of the copy never changes

Example: http://www.travelsite.com/flights-from-boston-to-new-york-bos-to-lga

Copy on page: blah blah blah Boston to New York blah blah blah. If you were to change either of the cities the copy would remain the same but the city would update.

Crawlers will crawl the page after it has loaded, so as long as the "dynamic" content is loaded prior to that the crawler doesn't know any different.

If my memory serves pages only need to be 5-10% different in copy to not be counted as duplicate content. So if your title, H1 and a few words in the sentence and some links are different that just about does it.

Now this doesn't make it a great user experience and as StreamMarket stated below, eventually Google will take notice of this and will move them down in ranking. Of course, this also means that other sites (Airlines) need to do a better job at creating pages like this but are user focused and not search engine focused.