What to Do When Your Accommodation or Tour Website is Listed on Another Site?

This happens a lot to Guest Houses as the referral (affiliate) market is well established and many people start sites to list accommodation, tours etc. Like we do on MyGQ here. It is a long slow process if done correctly.

Affiliates make a small commission – paid by the booking portals.

For most accommodation or tour owners this is a strange thing and their immediate knee jerk reaction is to demand deletion.

BUT, here are some reasons why you should pause before knee jerking:

Careful about asking for removal.

Why do we encourage search engines to list our sites – free advertising. Listing on directories (where the listing points back to your site) is a good thing. Linking back to your web site on social media is a good thing. Linking back to your web site from a tourism focused web site is a good thing.

Google states in their own documentation that they use directory listings to assess business prominence — a key ranking factor in local SEO. Not to mention, study after study has shown that directory listings impact local rankings. One of which even showed that listings distributed on 10 or more sites saw an average of 80% improved local visibility on Google.

I ask people to remove when they profit with others (called affiliate links) by not linking directly back to my site.

For every one you see, check if there is a valid hyperlink link to your site from the listing site’s page/article.

HOW?

1. Right Click on the page and select Page Source
2. Hit Ctrl F (to search that code)
3. Type in your own sites full URL
4. Enter to see if it is in the code or not

If not then check that it could benefit you in some way – like through a booking platform that has been proven to send you bookings.

If neither of the above then ask for removal or inclusion of a direct link back to your web site. – often a carrot works quite well: offer a link back or a discount on a stay. Think about it – even if there is no link back there is always the branding exposure that helps.

Some will ask for payment to do the work or enter your e-mail onto a newsletter list.

If you are a bit paranoid then create a throwaway e-mail address using an anonymous provider – like ProtonMail.

OR

In GMail you can give out dotted versions of your address to track where emails originate from e.g. me@gmail.com is the same as me.miscreant@gmail.com – then you will then see who has been handing your email address out to spammers.

Feel free to contact us to evaluate a good vs bad link.