I’ve been trying to use cuil but their results are very variable. Sometimes they are great – at least as good as google but other times they just don’t seem that relevant.
My www.bellhop.com.au site now has 999 results but one of the first page links is to a page on Ashanti witchcraft. And another is to a page that does not exist, although the whole site (budu) has gone so I’m not sure what that means.
I’m trialling adding user-generated content on my sites. But as unmoderated comments can often be a nightmare of spam – I’ve decided to try to limit the content to city descriptions. I think this will help to create a better experience for visitors to my sites.
It’ll also be over great use to webmasters who want to get more one way links to their site as I don’t require a link back form them. Just the effort of creating a few lines of original content.
The rules are the description must be original and at least 100 words. In return I’ll credit the source and add a link to their site. I think this offer of one way links will work for us both and for my audience.
So if you want links form a site that offers Australian hotels, or New Zealand hotels or hotels in Aisa then find a page without text and send me some content.
Oh, and no porn, gambling, pharmaceutical or links to other sites that would bring mine into disrepute.
I’ve started adding rates to my hotel comparison sites. As the sites cover several countries, they also cover several currencies which has added a new twist: how to display the correct currency symbol. Not all browsers support unicode currency characters so should I use an image? Possibly, so now I’ll have to look into that and find simple solution to check which currency it is then dispaly the correct symbol in the correct way.
Still, I’m pleased that the provider of the data ( www.HotelsCombined.com ) has started adding minimum rates in. It will make my sites sdo much more valuable.
Now if they’d just add brief descriptions …
Ok, so it’s not going to be a huge money spinner but Wikipedia lists Kazakstan as being in Central Asia so I’ve added it to my www.hotelbuddy.asia site so that you can now find the best hotel deals in Kazakhstan.
One problem being that my site is in English only and I’m not sure how many of the locals speak English … but perhaps English-speaking foreign travellers will find it useful.
Or perhaps the links to Tajikistan Hotels or Uzbekistan Hotels will be of more help.
Which brings up the issue of the domainance of English – or the presumption by many of those of us that speak it – that everyone else does too. Certainly I’ve often (to my shame) relied on the friendly help of English speaking natives when travelling rather than trying to speak their language – or some other immediary language we both share.
Many larger hotel sites do supply transalations for other languages but I often wonder how complete and therefore how useful they are.
The price of .asia domains has come down so I’ve registered www.hotelbuddy.asia and set up a site.
I’ve added a few countries and need to work out the state/regions for my automated process to work but there a few pages for people to find great hotel deals in Asia.
One of the blogs I read regularly is THE BOOT by Tim Hughes.
Recently Tim posted an article on a site that claims to rank the top 100 hotel sites.
If you love a list of hotel sites, you’ll like (and hate) TOP 100 HOTEL SITES
Using one of my SEO test sites I set up a link as the TOp 100 requested and lo-and-behold I’m at number 309:
http://www.top100hotel.com/www.bellhop.co.nz.html
So a site about New Zealand Hotels is the 309th most popular hotel site on the planet.
It’s even more popular than rooms-manager.com (Number 312) which describes itself as:
“ROOMS-MANAGER.COM, part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN) is Europe’s leading online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 15 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.
Established in 1996, ROOMS-MANAGER.COM offers competitive rates for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels through to a five star luxury. The site is available in 15 languages and offers over 30,000 hotels in more than 8,000 destinations.”
Update 4 Sept 2007: I’m now number 205, rising fast.
Rating: 3550 points* (was 3650 so someone has removed me …)
Update 12 Oct 2007: I’m now down to number 244. Looks like my popularity is fading ..
*amount mentions of word ‘www.bellhop.co.nz’ on the other websites
Update 3 August 2008: Looks like it’s time to remove it. I’m number 1660… nto getting much benefit from it now.
Poor Wyoming is the last State when listed alphabetically, so I decided to get that done now so it can start to be spidered.
It has sopme nice sounding counties:
Big Horn
Sweetwater county
or how about a visit the town of Thermoplois in Hot Springs County
Okay, so I got a bit carried away and registered www.hotelbuddy.biz but what the heck …
I’ve tried to concentrate on country/region specifi sites but why not go global as well.
