Internet Marketing of Tourism Products

I was trying to answer a friends questions the other day at lunch about his confusion over the order of what he considered the top ten websites offering apartments in Marbella. There’s lots of talk on what makes a good website stand out and where that is judged against its competitors when searching what is perceived to be the most prominent websites offering Apartments Marbella for instance.

The first thing which hits you on the most popular of search engines is that the total results given was in excess of one and a half million so surely, the top 10 carry a lot of weight, all have terms like “holiday rentals” “Villas to rent” “Marbella accommodation” and must each have major reasons for being listed. I have realised that the results change considerably depending if I am logged into my email account on the search provider and I thought what that means! Essentially, the provider is collecting my holiday apartments Marbella type phrases and what I click on thus drawing conclusions on what sorts of things I prefer to visit out of the lists that are served up. Is this good? I’m not sure… for instance what if I was truly open to any thing that might be presented to me from an adhoc search or a search looking specifically for a change… Would that result be influenced by a computer selecting a predefined set of sites based on existing preferences… quite possibly because when I’ve signed out, the results change quite a lot. I prefer to see what everybody else see’s when I’m conducting a search and dont need extra filtering because some logic in a computer is trying to second guess what I want to see.

Anyway,back to the search in hand - Holiday Apartments Marbella. which is in Spain for those who’ve never heard of it. The titles shown in the results were all very similar and the descriptions had a fair amount of differing content but I was set on finding out the domain creation date of each of them. I came across whosdomains which served my purpose and jotted down each domain and when it was first registered. For the conclusion of earliest first having some bearing I was at least curious to see if the top results showed an older registration date than the ones at the bottom of the first page.

For this illustration I am Ignoring the months in each case… the run of years from number one to number ten goes like this: 2001; 1999; 2004; 2007; 2002; 1996; 2004; 2003; 1999; 2002. Something which struck me immediately is that none of them are very recently registered, yet there’s an eleven year spread across the top ten and not in a linear order either. Have you heard of the phrase content is king? its something a lot quarters like to spout as the over riding decision factor and clearly a website with good content properly aimed at its target audience has to be a major benefit to both the site owner as well as the searcher. when going back to view the content of each of the top ten I see places where that rule doesnt seem to add up.

So it seems that the original hypothesis about older sites do better in search engines is only a part truth…. to satisfy my curiosity I looked at a page set back amongst the 12 page of results and there were plenty of old sites back there too. Clearly its unlikely to get a brand new site to the front of any large search result data set. However there’s clearly many other things at play here in final ordering, including but not limited to, site recommendations between sites, order of words used in the website’s titles etc and maybe even some sort of calculation on how popular the site is through visitors on its pages. Could the search results mirror consumer fashions and trends? was Marbella a hit holiday resort for the glamorous seeking vacations in the upmarket end of Spain way before holiday makers flocked to Portugal for instance? Would my search raised different questions if I’d selected Algarve apartments instead? maybe have a look and join in with the opinions.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.