We can all agree that Search is important in the vacation rental industry. Ask a property manager how they attract visitors to their site and ‘Search’ is likely the first word you’ll hear. As a result property managers are beginning to explore more creative ways to climb the Google rankings.

Earlier this week we were contacted by Best Coast Rentals of Port Aransas, Texas. In the interest of improving their search ranking, Best Coast Rentals wants to link to complimentary vacation rental sites - with the agreement that these same sites will link to Best Coast Rentals. This arrangement is referred to as a “link exchange”. Link exchanges are popular ways to boost “back links” - a key ingredient to Google’s Page Rank algorithm - however, link exchanges have their pitfalls.

Be Aware of BlackHats!!

As the market began to understand the importance of back links, so did the number of people attempting to “game” search engines by including all kinds of irrelevant links from other sites. Soon Google began to identify “link farms” - irrelevant sites linking to thousands of unrelated sites. This helped inflate the perceived popularity of participating sites within search engine rankings, but did not improve the relevance of Google’s search results. People attempting this strategy were label “black hats”.

Through the maturation of the Search industry, these techniques have been exposed and Search leaders, such as Google and Yahoo, developed techniques to effectively identify link farms and now ding participating websites effectively lowering their search ranking.

Why Best Coast Rentals is Legitimate

Best Coast Rentals link exchange program is not a black hat offer. Best Coast Rentals is only interested in linking to complimentary vacation rental sites and its Travel Links page not only links to participating websites, but also includes a blurb about the site. By including this additional content Best Coast Rentals maintains ‘relevancy’ - the golden word at Google.

FlipKey encourages Search collaboration within the vacation rental industry, but we advise participating companies to be careful to avoid Black Hat status. Focus on relevant and quality sites and you should be ok. If a participating site appears as a link farm, you will want to request that your website be removed from the site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Food for Thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.