As you might already know, Expedia is one of the known online booking (travel) site where you can book hotels, flights, cars and you can even buy event tickets. And as far as I know, they’ve been around for years and websites that have been around for years and a brand like Expedia have already gained a good reputation, domain age, links, etc. – in short you get the bigger and better chance in ranking well.
Why Expedia got the Penalty?
We’ll, it seems to be that they got the unnatural link penalty and NenadSEO.com have even noticed their link scheme (if they’re the ones doing it) and posted all about this last month. It seems this Abby (and probably including Jake) character have been writing content for Expedia and building links, and the content and the links they’ve built are not quality at all.As a SEO specialist, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest updates (that’s why I’m subscribed to sites like Search Engine Land). And these guys do not seem to be aware of what link scheme is, or even at least the Panda and Penguin update – where the Penguin update is also for unnatural links.
Let’s take a look at the content and the links they’ve built, shall we?
The article above is all about The 10 Best Gadgets for Your Vacation, which is still obviously (a bit) connected or relevant to travel (same niche as Expedia). If you’ll visit the link to the article, you’ll not able to see the same thing anymore, the links are removed, and so good thing Nenad got the screenshots for us.
But anyway, our main topic here are gadgets, the lists posted are gadgets and then suddenly you’ll like to (errr..) cheap flights? Can you already find cheap gadget these days at Expedia? Amazing!
Yes, this site is not alone linking to Expedia like this. Go check out Nenad’s post and take a look at more samples of what they did since some sites have removed the link already by now.
But please, take note. There’s no confirmation yet that the SEO team of Expedia have done this, it can also be the competitors doing this.
Yeap, your competitors can totally do that to your website! I’ve been there, one of my clients before ranked #1 and because they want to take over the position, they posted a lot of bad links going to my client’s site. And I hate SEO’s like that, they can’t compete without their dirty magic tricks.
So anyway, I’ll try to listen to the people in the virtual world on this since this might be helpful to us SEOs, especially to those who just started and learned about this.