Hotels Should Not Link to Tripadvisor

February 2011
If you’re the owner of a small, independent, luxury hotel and you’re website is working well for you, there’s no reason why you should link back to Tripadvisor via one of the free display links they provide. You need to bear in mind that including such a link will encourage visitors to leave your website for your page on Tripadvisor. Why would you want to do this, especially as this is where all your competitors are? If your website is working well by attracting plenty of visitors, you should be encouraging them to make an enquiry rather than going off to Trip Advisor.

Most hotel review pages on Tripadvisor have a few poor reviews, whether genuine or fake, and hotels should be responding to each one. More astute hoteliers are responding to every review, thereby creating, in my opinion, a very favourable impression.

Hoteliers should also bear in mind that all those hotels linking back to Tripadvisor are sending TA loads of extra traffic, thereby boosting the site’s ranking in the search engines. Once your visitors click on the link on your website, they’re taken to your page on Tripadvisor, the URL (page address) of which is obviously key-phrase-rich. This means that every time someone clicks on that link, it’s contributing to TA being ahead of your own website on Google when people search for your hotel! Some hoteliers might then regard Tripadvisor to be essential to their online success which, I assume, is precisely what TA wants.

Finally, all those hotels linking back to Tripadvisor are sending them loads of traffic. The resulting traffic figures could then be used to impress upon you and other hoteliers the value of TA.

Tags: Hotel Tripadvisor Links