Would you like to visit Turkey or Istanbul? Are you planning to make a hotel reservation online?
Then it seems that you have got a serious problem. You would probably search the keywords “istanbul hotels” or “turkey hotels” via popular search engines. There you would see hundreds of websites capable of making hotel reservations online, with a thousand variations like www.hotelsreservationsbookingsistanbul…… .com. I am recently meeting managers of various hotels in Istanbul and I learned that %70 of the hotel reservation websites regarding online reservations to Istanbul are owned by a few companies. They simply change their designs and register tens of domain names. I was told that a single company owns more than a hundred such domain names. As hundreds of different domain names are registered everyday, the domain names are getting more ridiculous than ever. Even the hotels are involving in the domain name madness, registering a different domain name everyday. The customers visit hundreds of websites to make a careful decision about their vacations. They are considering the advantages and disadvantages of the websites, the prices and the quality of services offered. But do they ever know the possibility that all of the websites they visit could belong to the same company or tour operator? Whichever website they choose, their reservation will probably be confirmed by the same person! This domain name madness has only one simple reason: to get a top 10 listing in the major search engines.
The search engine top listing battles are intensified by aggressive search engine algorithms. The main battle is for the top 10 listing of Google. Most of the managers ask the same question when you mentioned that you have a website about Istanbul. “Are you in the top 10 in Google?”. Who you are, what you do, what your content is comes thereafter. And I can not simply understand the robots of Google after considering the criteria of a robot friendly webpage. There is a limit to the number of keywords, to the length of your title and your description which makes your webpage a robot friendly webpage. You can use one of the many meta tag analyzer tools to find out if your website is robot friendly or not. Even if you do not care if your website is robot friendly or not, you would probably have some mercy when you place keyword and description meta tags. On January 8, 2003 the ninth listing of Google when you search “istanbul hotels” has a webpage title of 2261 words! Am I facing an ethical dilemma regarding brand image? All the major websites on the Internet simply choose their titles with their website or company names. But to be eligible for the top 10 results of Google, simply place a few thousand words in your title, and it is possible. Have these website owners ever heard of robot friendly pages? Or are these robots not so friendly at all? I would never consider my website to have a 3000 word title and a 5000 word keyword or description meta tag, so I think that I will never be able to find my website in the top 10 listing of Google. And as a customer, I would not trust a website with a few thousand words long title. The websites must compete to provide better quality services than their competitors. Getting a top 10 position in Google for a few days, only to be beaten by another website which have a hundred more keywords than you, does not make sense to me. These websites are not using Google to promote their businesses and services but they are promoting the businesses and services of Google. Their websites are being manipulated by complex search engine algorithms, consumed by a “top 10 madness”.
Possible Titles: “Top 10 Madness”, “The chaos of tourism sector in Turkey”, or anything you might find appropriate.
Barbaros Bostan is the web manager of istanbulportal.com, and currently a Ph.D. student at the Information Systems department of Marmara University. He is also a teaching assistant at the Information Systems and Technologies department of Yeditepe University.
