Just go into Google, put in a money term, grab someones headline, copy and paste it into Google SERPS within quotations. You’ll see loads of sites who are implementing the same thing.

I have asked TripAdvisor twice if they would care to comment on this article.

They registered its existence but said they do not comment on issues such as SEO.

If the big G wanted to remove these results from the serps they could easily do so. So why dont they?

My guess is that it’s not included in one of their rank algorithms and only shows in the serp description so therefore they think it’s not that important to remove it. Or they could just be making a shitload of revenue from it and haven’t had enough complaints.

However, I’m with you that it should not be included in the serps as it is helping TA get click-thru’s, advertising $’s and natural ranking for your brand. And if G are all for giving the brand more authority in the serps then this should be fixed.

oh, and it’s no coincidence that TA haven’t included your particular phrase anywhere on the site as body text.

This is my last word on this, honest!

Personally I do think TA are getting an SEO benefit here. I can’t prove it, and you seem to think “it’s just not true.”

Obviously I do think TA are using PPC copy (not just from Viator – from lots of publishers, TA really don’t care where it comes from) to dump keyword-rich, indexable content onto their pages. Numerous people have made similar accusations, so you seem to be in the minority arguing that this tactic is having zero impact on TA’s natural rankings.

So let’s agree to disagree.

At least we agree on one thing – Google ought to stop this, if only to prevent AdWords publishers from getting pissed when they see their own PPC copy appearing on a competitor’s natural search result.

I also fundamentally believe, once again, that PPC copy has no place in a natural search result. Full stop. No exceptions. Never.

I wish Google would clarify their policy and get serious about removing this clutter from the natural-search ecosystem.

Typical day in the TA office …. let’s think up a new keyword bucket we want to go for.. hmm “cheap airfares to xxx”.. we don’t need to add any destination specific content, just use a machine generated formula for titles, descriptions and Google Adsense will provide all the keyword rich content I need.

Add a flights booking engine on it and away we go… Will Google have a problem? no why should they – if someone clicks on adsense link they’ll get paid so will TA. Everyone is happy.

TA, backed up by some strong one-way inbound linking from the network of sites e.g. hotels.com, hotwire.com and you have a site that has all the ingredients for first page positions on the majority of flights terms.

Do I think it’s right that TA use Google Adsense to populate their pages with content – hell no.. it’s smart, but certainly not ethical.. . Furthermore – they aren’t the first company to be doing this, other comparison sites have been doing the same, just do an exact text search for your ad copy and you’ll be surprised how many other people are doing exactly the same.

I *do* actually believe they (Google) should make Tripadvisor do something about it, although I think we could discuss for ages what ‘deserves’ to show up in the SERPs…

However the jest of this article, and your blog post, are that it’s somehow benefiting Tripadvisor, which I just don’t see to be the case, and definitely not with these keywords. In your post you clearly state not having a problem with the ad, but with the:
“SEO boost from Viator … and Google is giving credit to TripAdvisor for having such fantastically taregted content (which Viator created!!) on its page.

We write a targeted ad about something. And Google uses that content to boost the SEO result of the site it appears on.”

I’m a big fan of Alex and the article itself is well written, but the title coupled with sentences like “However it now comes to light that Google are assisting TripAdvisor to maintain the status quo.” just aren’t correct. Not that the title isn’t true, because Google certainly *is* helping TripAdvisor maintain the barrier to entry, but it’s more with pages like http://www.tripadvisor.com/SmartDeals-g187793-Vatican_City_Lazio-Hotel-Deals.html (#1 for ‘Vatican City deals’ ?!) and a xxx more, on both TA and other sites they’ve bought through the years. You could write several blog posts on how TA, and others, get away with stuff that’s just plain nuts from where I’m sitting, but that’s just the way Google works. The bigger the brand, the more it gets away with.

The only place I see a possibility for SEO benefits relating to this is very long tail terms including your brand. Browsing through a few pages of ‘rome vatican viator’ will bring up TA daughter sites for example.

The only reason I recommended switching it off (presumably negative keywords like ‘tripadvisor’ might work if this is then considered search network?) was that it seemed like you thought it was giving Tripadvisor some unfair advantage for this term. As a competitor you wouldn’t want that, hence switching it off, till Google fixes this (if they do).

Bottom line, I don’t think any of us, except TA (oh, and they *are* that clever ), want to see this content in the SERPs. I also think that if you shout out to Matt Cutts et al, it probably would be dealt with. I can’t imagine that side of Google would be too happy being questioned on this.

(Sam, just curious, even if this was part of the content network and could be turned off by us, explain why you think this is something Viator ought to deal with at all in the first place? Why should *we* have to clean up Google’s and TripAdvisor’s mess? Why should we have to police where our PPC ad copy appears (beyond typical AdSense placements)? The fact you are putting the onus on us speaks volumes about the underlying problem here, and why it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.)

Second, your comments keep missing the point. Here it is again, in plain terms: PPC ad copy should not be showing up in natural search results.

It’s as simple as that. PPC ad copy should not be showing up in natural search results.

Fair play to TripAdvisor if this is an intentional tactic on their part, assuming it delivers some SEO benefit. My guess is, they may have no idea this is happening. I don’t think TripAdvisor are that clever. Though maybe I’m wrong here.

It doesn’t really matter either way, since ultimately this is a Google issue. As many people have commented, using the API this way pollutes the system and Google needs to make a call – do they want PPC ad copy showing up in natural results, or not?

Let’s hope the answer is “not”.

Also, the ad text is hurting tripadvisor more than helping them.

The only reason it’s happening in this case is that the search term is quite long, and google prefers the exact search term to show rather than the better meta description.

It is to do with the Google Adsense API in the context that if TripAdvisor were using the JavaScript widget then the Viator content wouldn’t appear on the TripAdvisor snippet on the Google search results.

If you read my last paragraph of the original post I did call TripAdvisor astute…. you have to keep pushing until you are told to stop – and that is exactly what TripAdvisor are doing. All credit to them (most large companies don’t ever push hard on anything so nice to see a few that do)

Its really in Google’s hands to determine if they see this as a problem and if so, what they are going to do about it.

I do see it as a problem (as comments have agreed with). One solution would be to support GoogleOn/GoogleOff for crawled pages, and in the Google Adsense API enforce that all content returned by the API is wrapped in those keywords hence excluded from being taken into account within main Google search results.

First off, Alex, you should always include the search term and url you are using for the search. You are using google.co.uk, which typically returns .co.uk results higher. That result should therefore be discounted, as it’s ranking on totally different merits than just on-page content. If you use .com set to english, that result is gone, and you end up with tripadvisor on spot 2, viator on 3.

The reason Tripadvisor is outranking Viator is that Tripadvisor has the term ‘things to do in Rome’ as the first words in their meta title. They’re certainly not pulling that out of the Adsense API This means they’ve been targeting that word for ages, probably with a good solid amount of internal links to follow it up.

Viator has this term in their meta title after character 50. You want to put your most valuable terms first as those at the end of a long meta title get deweighted, if counted at all. And they’re trying to rank that page on at least 3 other terms before they get to that one in their meta title. This kind of broad targetting worked very well before 2005, but not so much any more.

As to Google showing Viator’s ad text as on page content. This is just because that text matches the exact search term better than anything in the meta description. The longer the query, the more Google tries to match it exactly with on-page content. This could also happen on any regular adsense page as Google crawls javascript (yes, little known fact). Even without that ad there, Tripadvisor would have outranked viator *easily* as their h1 follows through on their meta title. Viator, not so much (they actually have 2 h1′s, a big no no when it comes to semantics and typically something assigned with spammy SEO plays – I don’t even know if Google would see the second h1 as there is only ever supposed to be one on a page). The combination of Viator trying to focus on too much on one page and thus not focusing on this term at all is what’s causing this. Has zilch to do with Google’s API. In addition, I’d wager that Viator’s meta description isn’t really the kind of ‘sentence’ that Google likes to see these days.

Viator’s not really doing anything wrong, they just seem to have maybe fallen behind in terms of SEO tactics. Nowadays, in SEO, less = more.

Last point, I think Viator should actually be *happy* that Google is using that meta description as it’s crappy reading compared to Trip Advisor’s own one: “Attractions in Rome, Lazio: See TripAdvisor’s 3,000 traveler reviews and photos of 540 things you can do when in Rome.” Again, a nice follow up on ‘things .. do in Rome’.

Alex, I submit that you actually should change the very sensationalistic title of this post. Maybe to something like ‘Tripadvisor continues to lead the way in the evolution of SEO’. Equally sensational, but about 100x more correct

How is this not in violation of Google’s ‘no paid links’ policy? Isn’t this just an example of Google breaking its own policy, by allowing TripAdvisor to benefit from a paid link (in this case, the paid advert text)?

Of course it is ironic the paid link is coming from Google itself. Google clearly should fix this.