Google tries new ways of capturing hotel reviews

NB: This is a guest article by Steve King, director of Local Search Platforms at SIM Partners, a Chicago-based full service, interactive marketing agency.

The very public flap between Google and TripAdvisor over hotel reviews continues to play out like a travel industry soap opera.

In case you have missed the drama, here is a run-down on what’s happened.

TripAdvisor, the leading source of user generated hotel reviews, is trying to block Google from displaying its content, accusing the search engine of providing an inferior user experience and “manipulating its systems” to promote Google Places over competitors.

For its part, Google says its Place Search is designed to help users find relevant content more easily.

At this point, TripAdvisor reviews on Google Places haven’t entirely disappeared – Google is simply directing consumers to other sites in order to see them.

In some cases, Google appears to be pulling TripAdvisor content from its international sites in the UK, India and other parts of the world.

In others, Google is using 2nd generation content from sites with review feeds from TripAdvisor, CitySearch, Yelp and other primary review sites embedded in their pages. A few examples are Epictrip, Travel.USnews.com and Residio.

Historically, Google has drawn reviews directly from sites generating unique content in order to avoid duplication.  This use of aggregator sites is a departure from past practices.

These tactics have ramifications for hoteliers and consumers. For instance, in some cases Google is counting the same review multiple times which has the potential to favor hotels with review feeds on multiple sites.

It also means that the impact of a few negative or positive reviews could be amplified because they’ll be picked up by multiple sites at the same time and then, in turn, be incorporated into their Google Places page.

Time will tell if all this has an impact on hotels’ Google star ratings.

Here’s an interesting example. A Google.com search displaying this Miami Beach, Florida, hotel shows links to 701 reviews for the property:

But on the Places Page for the same hotel, Google is showing 4,113 reviews. In the past, the number of reviews on the Google.com page matched the number of reviews on the corresponding Places Page:

A deeper look into the source of these reviews reveals that some are coming from two international TripAdvisor sites in the UK and Ireland while others are being drawn from Travelpod, which is also fed by TripAdvisor, so a single TripAdvisor review is being counted at least three times in the Google Places count of total reviews:

The following screen shots show examples of duplicate reviews on TripAdvisor UK…

…TripAdvisor Ireland…

…and Travelpod.

Here is why this is important: Google’s algorithm uses the hotel’s number of reviews as a signal when ranking sites and having more reviews has historically been linked to higher rankings.

So what should hoteliers do with this knowledge?

First, encourage customers to review their properties on a wide variety of credible sites – as many as possible.

Putting all their review “eggs” in a single basket leaves them vulnerable when this kind of content warfare breaks out. We’ve seen it before when Google blocked Yelp reviews from the Places Page.

Second, hotels should consider embracing their reviews by adding feeds to their own sites.

While this can be a sensitive issue due to the risk of a bad review being displayed on a property site, consumers are now accustomed to seeing a variety of review ratings and do not base their decision on a single rating, but take in the consistent themes they see among multiple reviews.

Regardless, hotels are going to have to address this challenge.

The growing importance of reviews to search engines and consumers is likely to reward hotels that get control of this content with improved rankings and more reservations.

NB: This is a guest article by Steve King, director of Local Search Platforms at SIM Partners, a Chicago-based full service, interactive marketing agency.