Mom + SEO Junkie = Burnt Toast

I noticed today that Tripadvisor.com has redesigned most of their site - a few sections arent done and it appears they will be rolling the whole site out gradually.  Interface is more user-friendly and it seems they have changed a few things - “Other Lodging” is now “Specialty lodging” - which is basically semantics if you ask me, same dang thing. I do like the new look a bit better - their old homepage was so crammed with stuff it was hard to know what to do with it.  2 things annoy me about tripadivsor.com:

1. They’re owned by Hotels.com and some other sites - so the only way to get a link is in their “other resources” area and that’s insane - getting a link from YOUR LISTING - never - they’ll only link to your hotels.com listing
2. Getting adwords (adsense) ads to show up there is a bit of a mystery.  All of our travel clients want “sponsored ads” on Tripadvisor - and we can get them there - sometimes - and purely by luck.  Not sure what the magic formula is, but some insight would be nice.  Google wasnt much help and Tripadvisor is pretty close-mouthed about the whole thing.  I would really really appreciate being able to run a site-targeted campaign there - they’d make a LOT of money off of my clients HINT HINT HINT.

I’m going to do a more detailed write-up of the changes over at the Blizz Blog - complete w/ screenshots, etc. so check over there tomorrow (12/18) afternoon for more details.