After watching this informative session on The Business of Online Travel I thought about Google and how they were helping us. In the video they talk about search engine optimization (SEO) and the fact it is not in the best interest of the user. They are perfectly right and it annoys me that if we do some change that are good for the user, we will hide content from the search engines and it will hurt us.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop there, there are still ways to fool search engines. This week I still found a site with Invisible links for user, but very visible to search engine. This is the worst kind of SEO, misleading the search engine to lead users to an irrelevant website.
Also there are still something bugging me with the results we get in the top ten. You almost always get links to exactly what you wanted in the top ten. That is great, but lets look at the rest of the 10. For exemple if I look for “walking directions” I get some(about half) reference to Google adding the walking directions to Google maps which is good. We can think that was the result I was looking for, but I don’t even get one direct link to Google Maps… Also I get results for walking directions in London, but when I go on the site, nothing only publicity. I also get a site with seo in the name, it’s certainly what I was looking for, obviously an SEO agency is what I need to get good walking directions.I bet there are at least 10 great site for finding predefined walking tours or to make your own like Google Maps. Why aren’t they listed?