Three years on from Google Panda, many travel sites struggle with traffic

Panda. Penguin. Hummingbird. The names conjure up images of harmlessly cute animals. But many owners of small and medium-sized travel websites worldwide …

If you search on “Airbnb” or “Yelp” on Google.com in the US, you’ll see sitelinks relevant to your local area. This seems unique to listings site in travel, and it doesn’t seem that useful.

There’s no missing it: Google’s experimentation with hotel price ads and booking is becoming more dramatic and prominent.

A string of well known travel brands – including Uptake and Travelpod – have fallen foul of a crackdown by Google on what it calls “low-quality sites” or “sites that are just not very useful”.