Canonical Issues

[Mark Jackson]

In my column last week, I asked readers to chime in on which Web site (Travelocity, Expedia or Orbitz) had canonical issues.

I would like to get a thread started here, for you guys to respond.

After I completed my column, I actually came across other issues (thanks in part to reader replies) that these Web sites are faced with.

If you have other interesting findings for these Web sites, please post them here! Perhaps we'll get these major travel portals to take notice!

[Kevin Heisler]

Great question, Mark. We've received tons of reader responses. So here's the breakdown from your SEW Experts "Au Natural" column:

Travelocity:

* 1,380,000 pages indexed in Yahoo.

* 18,900 backlinks indexed in Yahoo.

* Has the keyword in the URL. That never hurts.

* Title tag of home page is "Travel: Airfares, hotels, vacations, cruises, car rentals and more at Travelocity.com." So, the first keyword in the title tag of the home page is "Travel."

Expedia:

* 588,000 pages indexed in Yahoo.

* 48,600 backlinks indexed in Yahoo.

* Title tag of the home page is "Expedia Travel: Cheap Airfare, Hotels, Car Rental, Vacations & Cruises." Note to those responsible for SEO for Expedia: consider moving "Expedia" to the end of the title, to get the word "Travel" at the beginning of the title tag.

Orbitz:

* 1,460,000 pages indexed in Yahoo.

* 5,700 backlinks indexed in Yahoo.

* Title tag of the home page is "Orbitz: Cheap Travel, Flights, Hotels, Vacations, Car Rentals, Cruise, Activities." Again, consider moving "Orbitz" to the end of the title tag. The search engines are smart enough to know a search for "orbitz" is probably meant to find www.orbitz.com.

[tshears]

Nice stats on the sites, but what kind of canonicalization issues are they having?

[JohnW]

stuff like this:

http://www.travelocity.com/
http://travelocity.com/
http://www.travelocity.com/homepage/
http://www.travelocity.com/homepage/...ce=TRAVELOCITY
http://travelocity.com/homepage/
etc.

These are all the same page, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

[tshears]

Ouch. I guess IAC has built up so much network value it just doesn't matter.