Negative SEO hits Expedia real hard

Negative-SEO-techniqueSomething has gone terribly wrong with the website ranking of Expedia on Google searches, with it appearing to have been struck by a harmful SEO campaign. Such problems were discovered by an analysis done by the company.

The company lost 1/4th of its Google search visibility in the period between January 12th and 19th. This happened right after the search giant clamped down the efforts of Expedia in boosting its traffic via paid links from various sites.

Such a revelation caused the shares of Expedia to drop as the anxiety about the effect the weak SEO would be having on the company’s business.

A far deeper analysis was done by Searchmetrics’ CEO, Marcus Tober on what actually happened that allowed Expedia in losing that much visibility. Searchmetrics is the same company that unearthed the entire issue. Tober found out that the techniques used by the company in increasing the search visibility of the website were clumsy and out- dated. Also, they were used excessively. Tober said that it would be quite surprising if Expedia was held responsible for the entire thing that happened.

Tober, instead believes that 3 big reasons played important part in this entire thing. The first one being and in all possibility that a mock link building was used by Expedia a few years ago and they did forget about this, leaving them out there. Now the next reason could be that the SEO firm which Expedia hired is using obsolete techniques still. And now, the very last reason could be that the links may have been built by a competitor of Expedia some years ago so as to injure Expedia. This process is called negative SEO and unfortunately, this practise is quite common nowadays.

Whatever may have been the reason but it surely hurt Expedia badly. It hit the company so badly that a simple search such as “hotels” showed nothing in the search results. Usually, one can see Expedia on the very first page only and it was quite common in fact for the company to secure the third spot.

It also came into notice that many websites used the term “hotels” as the anchor text. This anchor text then links it back to the website of Expedia. All things considered, it appears that Expedia was victimised by a set of persons who planned to hurt the rankings of firms. However, Expedia is now in a recovery mode.