Expedia Falls On Google Penalty – Shares and Traffic, Massive Hit
Expedia seems to have lost 25% of their search visibility in Google according to search metrics. On Jan 21, 2014 Expedia got an unnatural link penalty, as a result of this, shares dropped 4% and traffic on website dropped 25%.
Officials from Expedia did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ‘The Associated Press’. However a Spokesman said that Google wouldn’t comment on search ranking for specific companies.
The blog Search Engine Land reported Monday, when markets were closed for a holiday, that Expedia appears to have lost 25 percent of its visibility on Google. The blog cited Searchmetrics, a digital marketing company that shows Expedia’s online visibility plummeting about a week ago.
It is unclear if this was done internally by Expedia itself or if it was done through an outside SEO Company. It is also unclear if they used some sort of link network or did all of this manually. But drops like this do appear to be link related.
Any website, no matter what the size, can get a penalty from Google, and when they do, it is bad news. The highest profile penalty thus far was JC Penny. But that might have just been topped.
Link penalties can be avoided by cleaning past purchased links, asking other websites to add a no follow, or having other websites pass the hyperlink through an intermediary URL that is blocked in your robot.txt file. This penalty is big news for the SEO community. As we can see, Google is still causing massive hardship for websites who buy links.
